Testing the Cosmic Censorship Conjecture with point particles: the
  effect of radiation reaction and the self-force
  A classical thought-experiment to destroy black holes was envisaged by Wald
in 1974: it consists of throwing particles with large angular momentum into an
extremal black hole, checking whether their capture can over-spin the black
hole past the extremal limit and create a naked singularity. Wald showed that
in the test-particle limit, particles that would be otherwise capable of
producing naked singularities are simply scattered. Recently Jacobson and
Sotiriou showed that if one considers instead a black hole that is almost, but
not exactly extremal, then in the absence of backreaction effects particle
capture could indeed over-spin the spacetime above the Kerr limit. Here we
analyze back-reaction effects and show that for some of the trajectories giving
rise to naked singularities, radiative effects can be neglected. However, for
these orbits the conservative self-force is important, and seems to have the
right sign to prevent the formation of naked singularities.
