Black hole collapse and bounce in effective loop quantum gravity

 Tuesday, November 24th

Edward Wilson-Ewing, University of New Brunswick

Black hole collapse and bounce in effective loop quantum gravity
PDF of the talk (300k)
Audio+Slides of the talk (640M)
SRT (Subtitles) of the talk (150K)

By Jorge Pullin, LSU

Stars are balls of fluid that are try to contract through their own gravitational attraction but are kept form doing so by burning nuclear fuel, which also makes them shine. When the fuel gets exhausted they start to contract. Depending on the details, the contraction can become uncontrollable, leading to an object so dense that gravity is so intense that not even light can escape from them. That is what is known as black hole. The matter continues to contract inside the black hole and eventually get highly concentrated. In classical general relativity, this leads to a "singularity", a point where density is infinite. It is expected that quantum gravity will eliminate such singularities, replacing them by a highly quantum region of high curvature.

Loop quantum gravity has led to scenarios of that nature. These investigations are pursued by restricting strongly the degrees of freedom of the problem before quantizing, this makes quantization possible. In this talk one of such proposals was considered. The particular freezing of degrees of freedom requires choosing certain coordinate systems that simplify the equations. This allows to treat the problem including the presence of matter. This in turn opens the possibility of studying how the matter collapses, forms the black hole, and then, since things never become singular, the matter explodes into a "white hole", the time reversal of a black hole. This opens new possibilities for understanding the ultimate fate of black holes and what happens to the information that falls into a black hole, is it lost or is it recovered? Further research will shed light on these issues.