Structure of the Black Hole's Cauchy-Horizon Singularity

Abstract

We study the Cauchy-horizon (CH) singularity of a spherical charged black hole perturbed nonlinearly by a self-gravitating massless scalar field. We show numerically that the singularity is weak both at the early and at the late sections of the CH, where the focusing of the area coordinate $r$ is strong. In the early section the metric is almost Reissner-Nordstr\"om, and the fields behave according to perturbation analysis. We find exact analytical expressions for the gradients of $r$ and of the scalar field, which are valid at both sections. We then verify these analytical results numerically.