Quantum Kinetics and Thermalization of Hawking Radiation – Dmitry Podolsky

Date: Tue. February 7th, 2012, 11:30 am-12:30 pm
Location: Rockefeller 221

Hawking’s discovery of black holes radiance along with Bekenstein’s conjecture of the generalized second law of thermodynamics inspired a conceptually pleasing connection between gravity, thermodynamics and quantum theory. However, the discovery that the spectrum of the radiation is in fact thermal, together with the no-hair theorem, has brought along with it some undesirable consequences, most notably the information loss paradox. There have been many proposals to the resolution of this paradox, with the most natural resolution being that during the time of collapse the radiation given off is not completely thermal and can carry small amounts of information with it. In this talk, we will revisit the Hawking radiation given off during the scenario of gravitational collapse by deriving quantum kinetic equation for the spectrum of Hawking radiation. We will solve the quantum kinetic equation and discuss the implications of our results toward the resolution of the information paradox.