Reflections on the Energy of Black Holes

Tevian Dray , Carlo Rovelli (1)

1 CPT - Centre de Physique Théorique - UMR 7332

Inside a black hole, there is no local way to say which side of a sphere is the inside, and which is the outside. One can easily be gulled by this fact into mixing up the sign of the energy. We lead the reader astray with a naïve treatment of the energy of a null shell in black hole spacetimes. We then resolve the confusion, showing that global, rather than local, considerations offer good guidance.

Mots clés: Black holes; negative energy; Schwarzschild spacetime; shells of matter

Domaines: Relativité Générale et Cosmologie Quantique [gr-qc]

Tevian Dray, Carlo Rovelli. Reflections on the Energy of Black Holes. 2024. ⟨hal-02088632⟩