Regular Rotating Black Holes: A Review

Abstract

The collapse of astrophysically significant bodies generates, under suitable conditions, black holes. Since one expects the generator of the black hole to be a rotating body, the black hole will also rotate. The existence of inner singularities in classical solutions for rotating black holes and the fact that General Relativity is incompatible with Quantum Mechanics lead us to seek for alternative regular models for rotating black holes. The interest in singularity-free rotating black holes has grown significantly in recent years, as shown by the increase in the number of published papers devoted to it. Undoubtedly, the latest observational developments (LIGO-VIRGO-KAGRA collaborations, the Event Horizon Telescope or, in the near future, the LISA project) and the possibility to probe our theoretical predictions have greatly contributed to awaken the interest. This text discusses the general characteristics of regular rotating black holes. These include the conditions needed to guarantee the absence of singularities and the consequences that such conditions entail for the violation of the energy conditions in black hole models. It is argued that regular rotating black holes do not require an extension through their inner disk, contrary to classical rotating black holes. In this way, the problems with negative-mass interpretations and causality violations appearing in classical solutions could be avoided. It has been included a discussion on the maximal extension and the usual global causal structure expected for these spacetimes. The different methods for obtaining regular rotating black holes are treated, including the use of the generalized Newman-Janis algorithm as an alibi to derive regular rotating black holes from regular spherically symmetric static ones. The text also provides an introduction to the thermodynamics and phenomenology of rotating black holes.