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

Abstract

Abstract 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. Our findings are in qualitative agreement with previous results in the context of renormalization group improved black holes, but additionally feature novel properties reminiscent of higher-derivative operators with specific non-local form factors.