PROPERTIES OF NAKED BLACK-HOLES

We investigate the properties of a class of near-extreme static black hole solutions called naked black holes. These black holes, which occu r in string theory, have small curvature invariants but large tidal fo rces outside their event horizons. We show that these large tidal forc es are due to a concentration of dilaton stress-energy near the horizo n. We study infalling test strings and find that they are highly excit ed by the large tidal forces, but remain small. Perhaps most important ly, it turns out that a small amount of infalling matter will cause th e curvature invariants to become large outside the horizon. Neverthele ss, an exact calculation shows that both the matter trajectories and t he classical black hole background are not significantly altered.