A path(-integral) toward non-perturbative effects in Hawking radiation

Abstract

Hawking’s seminal discovery of black hole evaporation was based on the semi-classical, perturbative method. Whether black hole evaporation may result in the loss of information remains undetermined. The solution to this paradox would most likely rely on the knowledge of the end-life of the evaporation, which evidently must be in the non-perturbative regime. Here we reinterpret the Hawking radiation as the tunneling of instantons, which is inherently non-perturbative. For definitiveness, we invoke the picture of shell–anti-shell pair production and show that it is equivalent to that of instanton tunneling. We find that such a shell pair production picture can help to elucidate firewalls and [Formula: see text] conjectures that attempt to solve the information paradox, and may be able to address the end-life issue toward an ultimate resolution.