Quantum extension of black holes

Tuesday, Oct 9th

Javier Olmedo, LSU
Title: Quantum Extension of Kruskal Black Holes 
PDF of the talk (500k)
Audio+Slides of the talk (17M)

By Jorge Pullin, LSU

In the interior of black holes the coordinates t and r swap roles. As one falls "towards the center" one is actually moving forward in time. This makes the interior of a black hole look like a contracting cosmology of a particular type, known as Kantowski-Sachs cosmology. This has allowed the use of loop quantum cosmology techniques to treat the interior of black holes. There have been several discussions of this, but they have some shortcomings. To begin with, they only cover the interior of the black hole. Moreover, some of the proposals have physical quantities with undesirable dependences on fiducial elements introduced in order to quantize or on the mass of the space-time.

This talk discusses overcoming these problems. To begin with, it is shown that the quantum treatment eliminates the singularity inside black holes and replaces with a region of large curvature. The value of the maximum curvature is universal and independent on the mass of the space-time. Moreover, it gives the same mass for the black hole to the past and to the future (unlike other treatments). In addition, the quantum theory is extended to the exterior region of the black hole. In the future it is expected to extend these ideas to other type of black hole space-times, like those with charge, spin and cosmological constant.