Regular Reissner-Nordstr\"om black hole solutions from linear electrodynamics

In recent years there have appeared in the literature a large number of static, spherically symmetric metrics, which are regular at the origin, asymptotically flat, and have both an event and a Cauchy horizon for certain range of the parameters. They have been interpreted as regular black hole (BH) spacetimes, and their physical source attributed to electric or magnetic monopoles in a suitable chosen nonlinear electrodynamics. Here we show that these metrics can also be interpreted as exact solutions of the Einstein equations coupled to ordinary linear electromagnetism{\textemdash}i.e., as sources of the Reissner-Nordstr\"om (RN) spacetime{\textemdash}provided the components of the effective energy-momentum tensor satisfy the dominant energy condition (DEC). We use some well-known regular BH metrics to construct nonsingular RN black holes, where the singularity at the RN center is replaced by a regular perfect fluid charged sphere (whose charge-to-mass ratio is not greater than $1$) which is inside the RN inner horizon.