“Mass inflation” with lightlike branes

Abstract 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.