The fate of Schwarzschild--de Sitter black holes: nonequilibrium evaporation

TL;DR

This paper provides an exact analytic model of Schwarzschild--de Sitter black hole evaporation in 2D dilaton gravity, capturing the full causal, thermodynamic, and quantum information aspects of the process.

Contribution

It introduces a fully solvable 2D model that includes backreaction, thermodynamics, and quantum information features of SdS black holes, unifying these aspects analytically.

Findings

Monotonic entropy growth during evaporation.

Black hole and cosmological horizons maintain $
b> b> throughout.

Emergence of quantum extremal surfaces and entanglement islands.

Abstract

We present a fully analytic treatment of Schwarzschild--de~Sitter (SdS) black-hole evaporation in two-dimensional dilaton gravity with anomaly-induced backreaction. Starting from the spherical reduction of four-dimensional Einstein gravity with a cosmological constant, we construct an exactly solvable 2D model that captures the full causal and thermodynamic structure of the SdS static patch, including both black-hole and cosmological horizons. Incorporating the trace anomaly of $N$ conformal matter fields via the Polyakov action, we determine the evolution of the black-hole mass and geometry in the Unruh--de~Sitter state, track the steady nonequilibrium Hawking flux, and compute local thermodynamic observables for static observers. The conserved Killing energy flux drives an irreversible heat current from the black hole to the cosmological horizon whenever their surface gravities differ, ensuring monotonic entropy growth and satisfaction of the generalized second law. We prove that $\kappa_b>\kappa_c$ throughout the physical static patch, so the only zero-flux configuration is the Nariai limit where the horizons coincide. Extending the framework to the quantum-information regime, we construct a thermo-controlled estimate of the Page curve and show how quantum extremal surfaces and entanglement islands emerge naturally within the anomaly-induced steady state. These results constitute a fully analytic, backreacted solution for SdS evaporation that unifies semiclassical thermodynamics and information flow in a cosmological setting, thereby elucidating the ultimate fate of evaporating black holes in de~Sitter space.