Paper detail

Non-thermal aspects of black hole radiance

The phenomenon of black hole thermodynamics raises several deep issues which any proper theory of quantum gravity must confront: to what extent does the inclusion of the back-reaction alter the thermal character of the radiation, how can the entropy be understood from a microscopic standpoint, what is the ultimate fate of an evaporating black hole, and is the outcome reconcilable with unitary time evolution in quantum mechanics? In the first part of this thesis, we address the issue of determining what the actual emission spectrum from a black hole is, once the gravitational field of the emitted quanta is included in a quantum mechanical manner. To make the problem tractable, we employ two important approximations: we quantize only the s-wave sector of the full theory, and we consider only single particle emission. By proceeding in the framework of a Hamiltonian path integral description of this system, we are able to integrate out the gravitational field, thereby obtaining an effective action depending only on the matter degrees of freedom. This effective action can then be second quantized in terms of new, corrected, mode solutions thus enabling the calculation of the emission spectrum from modified Bogoliubov coefficients. The results are particularly interesting in the case of emission from Reissner-Nordstrom black holes, since in the extremal limit our results are dramatically different from what a naive, and incorrect, semi-classical calculation would yield. The other major topic which we discuss is the dynamics of quantum fields on background geometries which undergo quantum tunneling. An example of such a system which has important implications for both cosmology and quantum gravity in general, is the tunneling of a false vacuum bubble leading to the creation