paper

High-Energy Gravitational Scattering and Bose-Einstein Condensates of Gravitons

arXiv:1406.4147 · doi:10.1007/JHEP12(2014)016

Abstract

Quantum black holes are difficult to describe. We consider two seemingly divergent approaches, high-energy scattering and the proposal to regard black holes as Bose-Einstein condensates of gravitons, and establish a connection between them. High-energy scattering is studied in the eikonal approximation, which is processed further by a saddle-point approximation. The dominant contribution to the scattering amplitude comes from a ladder diagram with the exchange of N gravitons, and the number of gravitons follows a Poisson distribution. This approximation supports the picture of a graviton Bose-Einstein condensate with an extent equal the Schwarzschild radius, which grows with N in a way determined by the saddle point. The approach permits calculations of 1 / N corrections from the fluctuations around the saddle points and we comment on these. Scattering methods might be useful probes of quantum black holes, especially when interpreted in terms of condensates.

arXiv comment8 pages, 1 figure

References in corpus (12)

Cited by in corpus (17)