QUANTUM NAKED SINGULARITIES IN 2D DILATON GRAVITY

Roughly speaking, naked singularities are singularities that may be se en by timelike observers. The Cosmic Censorship conjecture forbids the ir existence by stating that a reasonable system of energy will not, u nder reasonable conditions, collapse into a naked singularity. There a re however many (classical) counter-examples to this conjecture in the literature. We propose a defense of the conjecture through the quantu m theory. We will show that the Hawking effect and the accompanying ba ck reaction, when consistently applied to naked singularities in two-d imensional models of dilaton gravity with matter and a cosmological co nstant, prevent their formation by causing them to explode or to emit radiation catastrophically. This contrasts with black holes which radi ate slowly. If this phenomenon is reproduced in the four-dimensional w orld, the radiation accompanying the formation of naked singularities should have observable consequences.