  If an evaporating black hole does not settle down to a non radiating remnant,
a description by a semi classical Lorentz metric must contain either a naked
singularity or what we call a thunderbolt, a singularity that spreads out to
infinity on a spacelike or null path. We investigate this question in the
context of various two dimensional models that have been proposed. We find that
if the semi classical equations have an extra symmetry that make them solvable
in closed form, they seem to predict naked singularities but numerical
calculations indicate that more general semi classical equations, such as the
original CGHS ones give rise to thunderbolts. We therefore expect that the semi
classical approximation in four dimensions will lead to thunderbolts. We
interpret the prediction of thunderbolts as indicating that the semi classical
approximation breaks down at the end point of black hole evaporation, and we
would expect that a full quantum treatment would replace the thunderbolt with a
burst of high energy particles. The energy in such a burst would be too small
to account for the observed gamma ray bursts.

High Energy Physics - Theory