Quantum gravity effects in the CGHS model of collapse to a black hole

TL;DR

This paper investigates quantum gravity effects in the CGHS model of black hole formation, focusing on the classical solution sectors, quantum operator representations, and potential implications for Hawking radiation.

Contribution

It characterizes the classical solution sectors relevant for black hole formation and develops a nonperturbative quantum framework expressing operators via matter fields.

Findings

Only a specific sector of solutions describes black hole formation.

Quantum fluctuations of the metric can be large when matter is classical.

Operators are expressed in terms of matter fields on a Fock space.

Abstract

We show that only a sector of the classical solution space of the CGHS model describes formation of black holes through collapse of matter. This sector has either right or left moving matter. We describe the sector which has left moving matter in canonical language. In the nonperturbative quantum theory all operators are expressed in terms of the matter field operator which is represented on a Fock space. We discuss existence of large quantum fluctuations of the metric operator when the matter field is approximately classical. We end with some comments which may pertain to Hawking radiation in the context of the model.