Formation and evaporation of quantum black holes from the decoupling mechanism in quantum gravity

Understand

We propose a new method to account for quantum-gravitational effects in cosmological and black hole spacetimes.

• At the core of our construction is the "decoupling mechanism": when a physical infrared scale overcomes the effect of the regulator implementing the Wilsonian integration of fluctuating modes, the renormalization group flow of the scale-dependent effective action freezes out, so that at the decoupling scale the latter approximates the standard quantum effective action.
• Identifying the decoupling scale allows to access terms in the effective action that were not part of the original truncation and thus to study leading-order quantum corrections to field equations and their solutions.
• Starting from the Einstein-Hilbert truncation, we exploit for the first time the decoupling mechanism in quantum gravity to investigate the dynamics of quantum-corrected black holes from formation to evaporation.