Schwinger Mechanism and Hawking Radiation as Quantum Tunneling

TL;DR

This paper clarifies the quantum tunneling interpretation of Hawking radiation by employing Rindler coordinates, drawing an analogy with the Schwinger mechanism, and applies this to charged and BTZ black holes.

Contribution

It introduces a coordinate-invariant approach to describe black hole tunneling processes, resolving ambiguities in previous interpretations.

Findings

Successful description of black hole tunneling using Rindler coordinates

Application to charged black holes and BTZ black holes

Clarification of the tunneling process as analogous to the Schwinger mechanism

Abstract

The common interpretation of the Hawking radiation as quantum tunneling has some ambiguity such as coordinate-dependence of tunneling rate and non-invariance of the action under canonical transformations. It is shown that the tunneling process of black holes can be successfully described by Rindler coordinates in analogy with the Schwinger mechanism for pair production. We study the tunneling process of a charged black hole and a BTZ black hole.