Two faces of Hawking radiation and thin-shell emission: pair-creation vs. tunneling

TL;DR

This paper explores two interpretations of Hawking radiation—pair creation and tunneling—using path integrals and applies these ideas to thin-shell models, highlighting the physical significance of Euclidean path integrals in black hole physics.

Contribution

It provides a unified framework connecting pair creation and tunneling pictures of Hawking radiation through thin-shell models and Euclidean path integrals.

Findings

Both pair creation and tunneling are valid descriptions of Hawking radiation.

Thin-shell models with antishells illustrate the equivalence of the two pictures.

Euclidean path integrals have broad implications for non-perturbative black hole processes.

Abstract

We first revisit Hartle and Hawking's path integral derivation of Hawking radiation. In the first point of view, we interpret that a particle-antiparticle pair is created and the negative energy antiparticle falls into the black hole. On the other point of view, a particle inside the horizon, or beyond the Einstein-Rosen bridge, tunnels to outside the horizon, where this computation requires the analytic continuation of the time. These two faces of the Hawking radiation process can be extended to not only particles but also fields. As a concrete example, we study the thin-shell tunneling process; by introducing the antishell as a negative tension shell, we can give the consistent interpretation for two pictures, where one is a tunneling from inside to outside the horizon using instantons, while the other is a shell-antishell pair-creation. This shows that the Euclidean path integral indeed carries vast physical implications not only for perturbative, but also for non-perturbative processes.