Semiclassical Black Hole-White Hole transitions: an analytical treatment

Abstract

Recent numerical studies of semiclassical gravity suggest that, in spherically symmetric black holes with both outer and inner horizons, the semiclassical instability of the inner horizon can drive the complete evaporation of the trapped region on timescales shorter than the standard Hawking evaporation time. Independent simulations further indicate that the disappearance of the trapped region is followed by the formation of an anti-trapped region, i.e.~a dynamical white hole. In this work, we develop an analytic treatment of quantum effects in trapped and anti-trapped regions, showing how these numerical results can be understood within simplified two-dimensional models. We consider collapse models describing the formation of charged and regular black holes and compute the renormalized stress-energy tensor of the $|\textit{in}\rangle$ vacuum state. We show that, within this framework, the emergence of an anti-trapped region is a generic consequence of the amplification of negative energy fluxes propagating along the outgoing direction inside the initial trapped region. This provides an analytic explanation for the black-hole-to-white-hole transition observed in numerical simulations. Our analysis further suggests that the fluxes generated by the subsequent anti-trapped region, now propagating along the ingoing direction, may trigger the formation of a new trapped region. This raises the possibility of a cascade of black-to-white-hole transitions, potentially ending in a horizon-free, bouncing spacetime without invoking additional quantum-gravitational dynamics. Although establishing the complete evolution requires a self-consistent treatment of semiclassical backreaction, our framework identifies which features of the mechanism are universal and which depend on the geometry, laying the groundwork for a systematic investigation of semiclassical black-hole-to-white-hole transitions.