Vacuum polarisation and regular gravitational collapse

Abstract

It is the goal of this thesis to revisit and revise the problem of black hole formation and evolution in semiclassical gravity -- a theory in which spacetime is treated classically, while matter admits a quantum description, coupling to gravity through an expectation value of a stress-energy tensor operator. We examine the vacuum expectation value of this operator in a variety of spacetimes in which trapped regions form or are close to forming, drawing conclusions regarding the semiclassical dynamics of spacetime in these scenarios.

arXiv commentPhD thesis, 147 pages, 47 figures