Inextendible Schwarzschild black hole with a single exterior: How thermal is the Hawking radiation?

TL;DR

This paper investigates the Hawking radiation and entropy of a Schwarzschild black hole with a single exterior region, using the $ pthree$ geon spacetime, revealing that the radiation appears thermal and the entropy is halved compared to the standard case.

Contribution

It introduces the analysis of Hawking radiation on the $ pthree$ geon, a spacetime with a single exterior, and examines its thermal properties and entropy, challenging traditional assumptions based on Kruskal spacetime.

Findings

Hawking radiation appears thermal to exterior observers in the geon.

The path-integral approach yields half the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy.

Analogous results are found for Rindler observers in flat spacetime.

Abstract

Several approaches to Hawking radiation on Schwarzschild spacetime rely in some way or another on the fact that the Kruskal manifold has two causally disconnected exterior regions. We investigate the Hawking(-Unruh) effect for a real scalar field on the $\RPthree$ geon: an inextendible, globally hyperbolic, space and time orientable eternal black hole spacetime that is locally isometric to Kruskal but contains only one exterior region. The Hartle-Hawking-like vacuum~$\hhvacgeon$, which can be characterized alternatively by the positive frequency properties along the horizons or by the complex analytic properties of the Feynman propagator, turns out to contain exterior region Boulware modes in correlated pairs, and any operator in the exterior that only couples to one member of each correlated Boulware pair has thermal expectation values in the usual Hawking temperature. Generic operators in the exterior do not have this special form; however, we use a Bogoliubov transformation, a particle detector analysis, and a particle emission-absorption analysis that invokes the analytic properties of the Feynman propagator, to argue that $\hhvacgeon$ appears as a thermal bath with the standard Hawking temperature to any exterior observer at asymptotically early and late Schwarzschild times. A~(naive) saddle-point estimate for the path-integral-approach partition function yields for the geon only half of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of a Schwarzschild black hole with the same ADM mass: possible implications of this result for the validity of path-integral methods or for the statistical interpretation of black-hole entropy are discussed. Analogous results hold for a Rindler observer in a flat spacetime whose global properties mimic those of the geon.