Semiclassical approach to black hole evaporation

Black hole evaporation may lead to massive or massless remnants, or naked singularities. This paper investigates this process in the context of two quite different two-dimensional black hole models. The first is the original Callan-Giddings-Harvey-Strominger (CGHS) model, the second is another two-dimensional dilaton-gravity model, but with properties much closer to physics in the real, four-dimensional, world. Numerical simulations are performed of the formation and subsequent evaporation of black holes and the results are found to agree qualitatively with the exactly solved modified CGHS models, namely, that the semiclassical approximation breaks down just before a naked singularity appears.