On gravitational collapse and integrable singularities

Abstract Schwarzschild black holes are expected to emerge as the end states of the classical gravitational collapse from non-singular configurations. After integrable curvature singularities appear, the interior geometry can be modelled to exhibit a transition, called “Minkowski breaking”, when the inner horizon disappears, before all matter collapses into the central singularity. This picture implies a quantum framework to describe the final stages of the gravitational collapse, and here we will provide more insights from the semiclassical approximation for the energy–momentum tensor and the Madelung approximation for collapsing matter. In particular, we will show that the quantum potential in the Raychaudhuri equation starts to strongly oppose the collapse towards the Schwarzschild singularity precisely after the Minkowski breaking.