Gedanken experiments at high-order approximation: nearly extremal Reissner-Nordström black holes cannot be overcharged

A bstract The new version of the gedanken experiment proposed by Sorce and Wald has been used to examine the weak cosmic censorship conjecture (WCCC) for black holes at the second-order approximation of the matter fields perturbation. However, only considering the perturbation until the second-order approximation is incomplete because there is an optimal option such that the existing condition of the event horizon vanishes at second- order. For this circumstance, we cannot judge whether the WCCC is satisfied at this order. In our investigation, the k th-order perturbation inequality is generally derived. Using the inequalities, we examine the WCCC for nearly extremal Reissner-Nordstöm black holes at higher-order approximation. It is shown that the WCCC cannot be violated yet after the perturbation. From this result, it can be indicated that the WCCC is strictly satisfied at the perturbation level for nearly extremal RN black holes.