Cosmic censorship, area theorem, and self-energy of particles

The (zeroth-order) energy of a particle in the background of a black hole is given by Carter’s integrals. However, exact calculations of a particle’s self-energy (first-order corrections) are still beyond our present reach in many situations. In this paper we use Hawking’s area theorem in order to derive bounds on the self-energy of a particle in the vicinity of a black hole. Furthermore, we show that self-energy corrections must be taken into account in order to guarantee the validity of Penrose’s cosmic censorship conjecture.