Beyond the Semiclassical Description of Black Hole Evaporation

In the semiclassical treatment, i.e. in a classical black hole geometry, Hawking quanta emerge from trans-Planckian configurations because of scale invariance. There is indeed no scale to stop the blueshift effect encountered in the backward propagation toward the event horizon. On the contrary, when taking into account the gravitational interactions neglected in the semiclassical treatment, a new UV scale could be dynamically engendered and could stop the focusing. To show that this is the case, we use the large-N limit, where N is the number of matter fields. In this limit, the semiclassical treatment is the leading contribution. Nonlinear gravitational effects appear in the next orders and in the first of these, the effects are governed by the two-point correlation function of the energy–momentum tensor evaluated in the vacuum. In this case they can also be obtained by considering light propagation in a stochastic ensemble of metrics whose mean fluctuating properties are determined by this two-point function.