Semiclassical instability of inner-extremal regular black holes

Abstract: The construction of black hole spacetimes that are regular (singularity-free) is plagued by the "mass inflation" instability, a classical perturbation instability induced by the surface gravity at the inner horizon and characterized by exponentially diverging stress-energy there. Recently, a class of "inner-extremal" regular black holes was proposed that possesses a vanishing inner-horizon surface gravity and therefore avoids mass inflation, while still maintaining a horizon separation and a non-zero outer-horizon surface gravity. However, when semiclassical effects are taken into account, it is found that an inner-horizon instability remains for generic inner-extremal regular black holes formed from collapse. This semiclassical divergence is analyzed from the perspective of both the effective Hawking temperature and the renormalized stress-energy tensor, and its origin and genericity are examined in detail.