One-loop pure-gravity contributions to a black-hole geometry with quantum fluctuations

A black-hole is unstable to zero-means quantum fluctuations of its metric. These quantum fluctuations break the degeneracy of the locations of the event-horizon and the apparent-horizon for a Schwarzschild black-hole. The path-integral in spacetime with Euclidean signature is calculated from the ADM action to second order in the variations. It is found that the second-order term of this perturbation expansion gives the same contribution to the path-integral as the zeroth-order term for these particular fluctuations. A surface near the black-hole event-horizon is correctly treated as a boundary, and this surface makes a substantial contribution to the path-integral. One may treat this path-integral as a partition function and calculate thermodynamic quantities. The entropy of this black-hole, for example, is found to be close to the accepted value of A/4h, where A is the black-hole surface area. The meaning of these particular fluctuations and the importance of the boundary near the event-horizon is discussed