VACUUM POLARIZATION AND THE BLACK-HOLE SINGULARITY

In order to investigate the effects of vacuum polarization on mass inflation singularities, we study a simple toy model of a charged black hole with cross flowing radial null dust which is homogeneous in the black hole interior. In the region r2 much less than e2 we find an approximate analytic solution to the classical field equations. The renormalized stress-energy tensor, for conformally coupled fields, is evaluated on this background and we find the vacuum polarization backreaction corrections to the mass function m(r). Asymptotic analysis of the semiclassical mass function shows that the mass inflation singularity is much stronger in the presence of vacuum polarization than in the classical case.