"Mass Inflation" With Lightlike Branes

Understand

We discuss properties of a new class of p-brane models, describing intrinsically lightlike branes for any world-volume dimension, in various gravitational backgrounds of interest in the context of black hole physics.

• One of the characteristic features of these lightlike p-branes is that the brane tension appears as an additional nontrivial dynamical world-volume degree of freedom.
• Codimension one lightlike brane dynamics requires that bulk space with a bulk metric of spherically symmetric type must possess an event horizon which is automatically occupied by the lightlike brane while its tension evolves exponentially with time.
• The latter phenomenon is an analog of the well known "mass inflation" effect in black holes.