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fliptomato
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Cartoon picture of Hawking Radiation--is it accurate?
Hello everyone,
The 'cartoon' picture of Hawking Radiation that I keep hearing is that you have a black hole and and particle-anti-particle pair production near the event horizon. One of the particles escapes, while the other is eaten by the black hole. The escaping particle is Hawking Radiation.
However, Hawking Radiation is supposed to account for the evaporation of black holes; i.e. black holes losing energy and shrinking by emitting radiation. In the cartoon picture above, I don't understand how this happens.
While there's certainly 'radiation' in terms of the emitted particle, the black hole has absorbed the particle's (anti-)partner, and hence it's energy has increased, right? (Even if it absorbed an anti-matter particle, those still have positive energy.)
Also, what about the vacuum? In principle the particle-anti-particle pair was created out of the vacuum energy. I'm still a little unclear about this idea. Presumably the Standard Model vertex for pair creation comes rom the mass term [tex]m^2\psi\bar{\psi}[/tex], for some field [tex]\psi[/tex]. Usually (i.e. neglecting vacuum energy) this vertex is not allowed, since it violates conservation of energy. However, one can extract vacuum energy and pair produce, apparently. What happens to the energy that was taken from the vacuum? Is there a vacuum energy "hole"?
Would it be incorrect for me to think about vacuum energy as coupling to a graviton field near a black hole? (I guess this is fundamentally a different thing, so it probably is incorrect--but does this come into play?)
Thanks,
Flip
Hello everyone,
The 'cartoon' picture of Hawking Radiation that I keep hearing is that you have a black hole and and particle-anti-particle pair production near the event horizon. One of the particles escapes, while the other is eaten by the black hole. The escaping particle is Hawking Radiation.
However, Hawking Radiation is supposed to account for the evaporation of black holes; i.e. black holes losing energy and shrinking by emitting radiation. In the cartoon picture above, I don't understand how this happens.
While there's certainly 'radiation' in terms of the emitted particle, the black hole has absorbed the particle's (anti-)partner, and hence it's energy has increased, right? (Even if it absorbed an anti-matter particle, those still have positive energy.)
Also, what about the vacuum? In principle the particle-anti-particle pair was created out of the vacuum energy. I'm still a little unclear about this idea. Presumably the Standard Model vertex for pair creation comes rom the mass term [tex]m^2\psi\bar{\psi}[/tex], for some field [tex]\psi[/tex]. Usually (i.e. neglecting vacuum energy) this vertex is not allowed, since it violates conservation of energy. However, one can extract vacuum energy and pair produce, apparently. What happens to the energy that was taken from the vacuum? Is there a vacuum energy "hole"?
Would it be incorrect for me to think about vacuum energy as coupling to a graviton field near a black hole? (I guess this is fundamentally a different thing, so it probably is incorrect--but does this come into play?)
Thanks,
Flip