Semiclassical effects in black hole interiors

First-order semiclassical perturbations to the Schwarzschild black hole geometry are studied within the black hole interior. The source of the perturbations is taken to be the vacuum stress-energy of quantized scalar, spinor, and vector fields, evaluated using analytic approximations developed by Page and others (for massless fields) and the DeWitt-Schwinger approximation (for massive fields). Viewing the interior as an anisotropic collapsing cosmology, we find that minimally or conformally coupled scalar fields, and spinor fields, decrease the anisotropy as the singularity is approached, while vector fields increase the anisotropy. In addition, we find that massless fields of all spins, and massive vector fields, strengthen the singularity, while massive scalar and spinor fields tend to slow the growth of curvature. Typeset using REVTEX