On the universality of mass inflation inside black holes

The Cauchy horizon of the Reissner-Nordstrom black hole has been shown to be unstable under the perturbation of infalling and outgoing fluxes of radiation. Its behavior is characterized by an exponentially increasing mass function inside the hole. In this thesis I investigate the interiors of various black holes which arise as solutions of different low-energy candidates for quantum gravity theories. The spacetimes I consider include (1 + 1)-dimensional dilaton spacetimes, the (2 + 1)-dimensional black hole, a black string in 3 + 1 dimensions and Schwarzschild-anti-de Sitter spacetime. I find that mass inflation is a process in which divergence of the inner mass function strongly depends on the attenuating behavior of the late time radiation. I calculate the radiation falloff rates in different black hole backgrounds, both analytically and numerically, and investigate the circumstances which are conducive to mass inflation. In certain cases the falloff can be so strong that the inner mass function is not divergent at the Cauchy horizon under the perturbation of the ingoing and outgoing radiation.