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Black Holes, Wormholes, and the Disappearance of Global Charge

One of the paradoxes associated with the theory of the formation and subsequent Hawking evaporation of a black hole is the disappearance of conserved global charges. It has long been known that metric fluctuations at short distances (wormholes) violate global-charge conservation; if global charges are apparently conserved at ordinary energies, it is only because wormhole-induced global-charge-violating terms in the low-energy effective Lagrangian are suppressed by large mass denominators. However, such suppressed interactions can become important at the high energy densities inside a collapsing star. We analyze this effect for a simple model of the black-hole singularity. (Our analysis is totally independent of any detailed theory of wormhole dynamics; in particular it does not depend on the wormhole theory of the vanishing of the cosmological constant.) We find that in general all charge is extinguished before the infalling matter crosses the singularity. No global charge appears in the outgoing Hawking radiation because it has all gone down the wormholes.