Toy Models For Black Hole Evaporation

Abstract

These are lecture notes for the 1992 Erice Workshop on Theoretical Physics. They first present a summary of the paradox of information loss to black holes, of its proposed resolutions, and of the flaws in the proposed resolutions. There follows a review of recent attempts to attack this problem, and other issues in black hole physics, using two-dimensional dilaton gravity theories as toy models. These toy models contain collapsing black holes and have for the first time enabled an explicit semiclassical treatment of the backreaction of the Hawking radiation on the geometry of an evaporating black hole. However, a complete answer to the information conundrum seems to require physics beyond the semiclassical approximation. Preliminary attempts to make progress in this direction, using connections to conformal field theory, are described.

18 pages, UCSBTH-92-36. (Minor typo corrected.)

References in corpus (6)

• Black Holes and Massive Remnants
• Are Horned Particles the Climax of Hawking Evaporation?
• Evaporation of Two Dimensional Black Holes
• Fadeev-Popov Ghosts and 1+1 Dimensional Black Hole Evaporation
• Quantum Theories of Dilaton Gravity
• Quantum Black Holes

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Information in Black Hole Radiation
• Geometrodynamics of Schwarzschild Black Holes
• Semiclassical Extremal Blackholes
• Constraints on Black Hole Remnants
• Determining the Minimal Length Scale of the Generalized Uncertainty Principle from the Entropy-Area Relationship
• Numerical Solutions of Dilaton Gravity and the Semi-Classical Singularity