Matter and gravitons in the gravitational collapse

TL;DR

This paper explores how gravitons influence black hole formation during gravitational collapse, proposing a model where black holes are Bose-Einstein condensates of gravitons and baryons, with implications for Hawking radiation.

Contribution

It introduces a corpuscular black hole model where gravitons and baryons form a condensate, linking graviton effects to black hole area law and Hawking emission.

Findings

Graviton number conservation aligns with Bekenstein's area law.

Interaction energy reproduces post-Newtonian corrections.

Hawking emission arises from quantum depletion of the condensate.

Abstract

We consider the effects of gravitons in the collapse of baryonic matter that forms a black hole. We first note that the effective number of (soft off-shell) gravitons that account for the (negative) Newtonian potential energy generated by the baryons is conserved and always in agreement with Bekenstein's area law of black holes. Moreover, their (positive) interaction energy reproduces the expected post-Newtonian correction and becomes of the order of the total ADM mass of the system when the size of the collapsing object approaches its gravitational radius. This result supports a scenario in which the gravitational collapse of regular baryonic matter produces a corpuscular black hole without central singularity, in which both gravitons and baryons are marginally bound and form a Bose-Einstein condensate at the critical point. The Hawking emission of baryons and gravitons is then described by the quantum depletion of the condensate and we show the two energy fluxes are comparable, albeit negligibly small on astrophysical scales.