arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to S. Massar.
The semi-classical back reaction to black hole evaporation (wherein the renormalized energy momentum tensor is taken as source of Einstein's equations) is analyzed in detail. It is proven that the mass of a Schwarzshild black hole decreases according to Hawking's law $dM/dt = - C/ M^2$ where $C$ is a constant of order one and that the particles are emitted with a thermal spectrum at temperature $1/8πM(t)$.
The vacuum fluctuations that induce the transitions and the thermalisation of a uniformly accelerated two level atom are studied in detail. Their energy content is revealed through the weak measurement formalism of Aharonov et al. It is shown that each time the detector makes a transition it radiates a Minkowski photon. The same analysis is then applied to the conversion of vacuum fluctuations into real quanta in the context of black hole radiation. Initially these fluctuations are located around the light like geodesic that shall generate the horizon and carry zero total energy. However upon exiting from the star they break up into two pieces one of which gradually acquires positive energy and becomes a Hawking quantum, the other, its ''partner", ends up in the singularity. As time goes by the vacuum fluctuations generating Hawking quanta have exponentially large energy densities. This implies that back reaction effects are large.
The emergence of Hawking radiation from vacuum fluctuations is analyzed in conventional field theories and their energy content is defined through the Aharonov weak value concept. These fluctuations travel in flat space-time and carry transplanckian energies sharply localized on cisplanckian distances. We argue that these features cannot accommodate gravitational nonlinearities. We suggest that the very emission of Hawking photons from tamed vacuum fluctuations requires the existence of an exploding set of massive fields. These considerations corroborate some conjectures of Susskind and may prove relevant for the back-reaction problem and for the unitarity issue.
We show how to apply post selection in the context of weak measurement of Aharonov and collaborators to construct the quantum back reaction on a classical field. The particular case which we study in this paper is pair creation in an external electric field and the back reaction is the counter field produced by the pair \underline {as} it is made. The construction leads to a complex electric field obtained from non diagonal matrix elements of the current operator, the interpretation of which is clear in terms of weak measurement. The analogous construction applied to black hole physics (thereby leading to a complex metric) is relegated to a future paper.
Local modes and local particles are defined at any point in curved space time as those that most resemble Minkowsky modes at that point. It is shown that the renormalised stress tensor is the difference of energy between the physical vacuum and that defined by these local modes.
The method of Hawking to obtain black hole evaporation through Bogoljubov transformation between asymptotic modes (in and out) is generalized. The construction is local in that the in modes (of say positive frequency) are decomposed by Bogoljubov transformation into positive and negative frequency local inertial modes (i.e. those which are solutions of the d'Alembertian in terms of the local normal coordinates). From this follows an interesting reexpression of the local energy momentum tensor, more particularly of the outgoing energy flux. One finds that even in the local description there exists a partial thermal character parametrized by a local temperature. There exists quantum interference effects as well. These become negligible at large distance from the black hole.
The particle detector model consisting of a harmonic oscillator coupled to a scalar field in $1+1$ dimensions is investigated in the inertial case. The same approach is then used in the accelerating case. The absence of radiation from a uniformly accelerated detector in a stationnary state is discussed and clarified.