Hawking radiation from extremal and nonextremal black holes

The relationship between Hawking radiation emitted by nonextremal and extremal Reissner-Nordstrom black holes is critically analyzed. A careful study of a series of regular collapsing geometries reveals that the stress energy tensor stays regular in the extremal limit and is smoothly connected to that of nonextremal black holes. The unexpected feature is that the late time transients which played little role in the nonextremal case are necessary to preserve the well-defined character of the flux in the extremal case. The known singular behavior of the static energy density of extremal black holes is recovered from our series by neglecting these transients, when performing what turns out to be an illegitimate late time limit. Although our results are derived in two-dimensional settings, we explain why they should also apply to higher dimensional black holes.