The weak cosmic censorship conjecture (WCCC) of black holes is a fundamental hypothesis in general relativity. The proof of this hypothesis has become a frontier issue in the study of gravity. Recently, Sorce and Wald proposed a new version of the gedanken experiment and examined that the WCCC of Kerr-Newman (KN) black holes is valid under the second-order approximation of the matter fields perturbation. But it is not enough to study the WCCC under the second-order approximation because there is an additional condition that makes the validity of the hypothesis impossible to judge in this case. Therefore, the higher-order approximation of the perturbation process should be further considered to examine the conjecture strictly. Based on the new version of the gedanken experiment, from the two assumptions that the spacetime geometry satisfies the stability condition and that the matter fields should obey the null energy condition, we deduce the $n$th-order perturbation inequality and demonstrate that the event horizon of KN black holes always exists under the $n$th-order approximation of the matter fields perturbation. It indicates that the hypothesis is always satisfied under the arbitrary high-order approximation and also shows that the WCCC of KN black holes has been examined rigorously at the perturbation level.

• Received 14 August 2022
• Accepted 14 September 2022

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.106.064050