2014

Thermality of the Hawking flux

Visser, Matt

Understand

Is the Hawking flux "thermal"? Unfortunately, the answer to this seemingly innocent question depends on a number of often unstated, but quite crucial, technical assumptions built into modern (mis-)interpretations of the word "thermal".

  • The original 1850's notions of thermality --- based on classical thermodynamic reasoning applied to idealized "black bodies" or "lamp black surfaces" --- when supplemented by specific basic quantum ideas from the early 1900's, immediately led to the notion of the black-body spectrum, (the Planck-shaped spectrum), but "without" any specific assumptions or conclusions regarding correlations between the quanta.
  • Many (not all) modern authors (often implicitly and unintentionally) add an extra, and quite unnecessary, assumption that there are no correlations in the black-body radiation; but such usage is profoundly ahistorical and dangerously misleading.
  • Specifically, the Hawking flux from an evaporating black hole, (just like the radiation flux from a leaky furnace or a burning lump of coal), is only "approximately" Planck-shaped over a bounded frequency range.

Built on

Nothing clear enough to list yet.

Similar

Nothing clear enough to list yet.

Then

Nothing clear enough to list yet.

Beyond the bibliography

alphaXiv searches the wider corpus for related work and actual follow-ups.

Open on alphaXiv

alphaXiv is searching for related work…