Unitary Theory of Evaporating 2D Black Holes

TL;DR

This paper presents a unitary approach to 2D dilaton quantum gravity, enabling calculation of quantum corrections to black hole metrics and revealing an evaporating black hole ending as a remnant.

Contribution

It introduces a manifestly unitary formulation of 2D dilaton gravity using reduced phase space quantization, allowing systematic quantum corrections to black hole metrics.

Findings

Lowest order semiclassical metric matches known one-loop results.

The model describes black hole evaporation ending in a remnant.

Higher order corrections and black hole fate are discussed.

Abstract

We study a manifestly unitary formulation of 2d dilaton quantum gravity based on the reduced phase space quantization. The spacetime metric can be expanded in a formal power series of the matter energy-momentum tensor operator. This expansion can be used for calculating the quantum corrections to the classical black hole metric by evaluating the expectation value of the metric operator in an appropriate class of the physical states. When the normal ordering in the metric operator is chosen to be with respect to Kruskal vacuum, the lowest order semiclassical metric is exactly the one-loop effective action metric discovered by Bose, Parker and Peleg. The corresponding semiclassical geometry describes an evaporating black hole which ends up as a remnant. The calculation of higher order corrections and implications for the black hole fate are discussed.