Hawking radiation as instantons

Abstract

There have been various interpretations of Hawking radiation proposed based on the perturbative approach, and all have confirmed Hawking's original finding. One major conceptual challenge of Hawking evaporation is the associated black hole information loss paradox, which remains unresolved. A key factor to the issue is the end-stage of the black hole evaporation. Unfortunately by then the evaporation process becomes non-perturbative. Aspired to provide a tool for the eventual solution to this problem, here we introduce a new interpretation of Hawking radiation as the tunneling of instantons. We study instantons of a massless scalar field in Einstein gravity. We consider a complex-valued instanton that connects an initial pure black hole state to a black hole with a scalar field that represents the Hawking radiation at future null infinity, where its action depends only on the areal entropy difference. By comparing it with several independent approaches to Hawking radiation in the perturbative limit, we conclude that Hawking radiation may indeed be described by a family of instantons. Since the instanton approach can describe non-perturbative processes, we hope that our new interpretation and holistic method may shed lights on the information loss problem.

17 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (5)

• The Classical Universes of the No-Boundary Quantum State
• The No-Boundary Measure of the Universe
• False Vacuum Decay Catalyzed by Black Holes
• Constructing a counterexample to the black hole complementarity
• Thin-shell bubbles and information loss problem in anti de Sitter background

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• Ellis Wormholes in Anti-De Sitter Space
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• A path(-integral) toward non-perturbative effects in Hawking radiation
• Resolving information loss paradox with Euclidean path integral
• Before the Page time: maximum entanglements or the return of the monster?
• Holographic Naturalness and Topological Phase Transitions
• Vacuum decay and bubble nucleation in the anti-de Sitter black holes
• Demonstration of the Hayden-Preskill protocol via mutual information
• Two faces of Hawking radiation and thin-shell emission: pair-creation vs. tunneling
• Solving information loss paradox via Euclidean path integral