How Not to Extract Information From Black Holes: Cosmic Censorship as a Guiding Principle

Abstract

Black holes in general relativity are commonly believed to evolve towards a Schwarzschild state as they gradually lose angular momentum and electrical charge under Hawking evaporation. However, when Kim and Wen applied quantum information theory to Hawking evaporation and argued that Hawking particles with maximum mutual information could dominate the emission process, they found that charged black holes tend towards extremality. In view of some evidence pointing towards extremal black holes being effectively singular, this would violate the cosmic censorship conjecture. Nevertheless, since the Kim-Wen model is too simplistic (e.g. it assumes a continuous spectrum of particles with arbitrary charge-to-mass ratio), one might hope that a more realistic model could avoid this problem. In this work, we show that having only a finite species of charged particles would actually worsen the situation, with some end states becoming a naked singularity. With this model as an example, we emphasize the need to study whether charged black holes can violate cosmic censorship under a given model of Hawking evaporation.