The breakdown of weak null singularities inside black holes

Abstract

It is widely expected that generic black holes have a nonempty but weakly singular Cauchy horizon, due to mass inflation. Indeed this has been proven by the author in the spherical collapse of a charged scalar field, under decay assumptions of the field in the black exterior which are conjectured to be generic. A natural question then arises: can this weakly singular Cauchy horizon close off the space-time, or does the weak null singularity necessarily “break down,” giving way to a different type of singularity? The main result of this paper is to prove that the Cauchy horizon cannot ever “close off” the space-time. As a consequence, the weak null singularity breaks down and transitions to a stronger singularity for which the area-radius r extends to 0.