Pre-Hawking Radiation from a Collapsing Shell

TL;DR

This paper studies how massive radiation during the collapse of a spherical shell affects the radiation spectrum, showing that mass suppresses low-energy radiation and influences black hole formation.

Contribution

It introduces a functional Schrödinger approach to analyze massive radiation during collapse, revealing mass-dependent suppression of infrared radiation.

Findings

Massive radiation is suppressed by a factor of e^{-eta m} in the infrared regime.

Massive collapsing shells predominantly radiate massless fields.

Massive radiation suppression impacts the evaporation process of collapsing objects.

Abstract

We investigate the effect of induced massive radiation given off during the time of collapse of a massive spherically symmetric domain wall in the context of the functional Schr\"odinger formalism. Here we find that the introduction of mass suppresses the occupation number in the infrared regime of the induced radiation during the collapse. The suppression factor is found to be given by $e^{-\beta m}$, which is in agreement with the expected Planckian distribution of induced radiation. Thus a massive collapsing domain wall will radiate mostly (if not exclusively) massless scalar fields, making it difficult for the domain wall to shed any global quantum numbers and evaporate before the horizon is formed.