Published November 1, 2020 | Version v1
Journal article

Annihilation-to-nothing: a quantum gravitational boundary condition for the Schwarzschild black hole

  • 1. Department of Theoretical Physics, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Bilbao 48080 (Spain)
  • 2. Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics, Pohang 37673 (Korea, Republic of)
  • 3. Department of Physics and Center for Theoretical Sciences, National Taiwan University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan (China)
  • 4. Department of Physics Education, Pusan National University, Busan 46241 (Korea, Republic of)

Description

The interior of a static Schwarzschild metric can be written in terms of two functions, similar to some models of anisotropic cosmology. With a suitable choice of canonical variables, we solve the Wheeler-DeWitt equation (WDW) inside the horizon of a Schwarzschild black hole. By imposing classicality near the horizon, and requiring boundedness of the wave function, we get a rather generic solution of the WDW equation, whose steepest-descent solution, i.e., the ridge of the wave function, coincides nicely with the classical trajectory. However, there is an ambiguity in defining the arrow of time which leads to two possible interpretations—(i) if there is only one arrow of time, one can infer that the steepest-descent of the wave function follows the classical trajectory throughout: coming from the event horizon and going all the way down to the singularity, while (ii) if there are two different arrows of time in two separate regimes, it can be inferred that the steepest-descent of the wave function comes inwards from the event horizon in one region while it moves outwards from the singularity in the other region, and there exists an annihilation process of these two parts of the wave function inside the horizon. Adopting the second interpretation could shed light on the information loss paradox: as time goes on, probabilities for histories that include black holes and singularities decay to zero and eventually only trivial geometries dominate.

Availability note (English)

Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1475-7516/2020/11/002

Additional details

Publishing Information

Journal Title
Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
Journal Volume
2020
Journal Issue
11
Journal Page Range
p. 002
ISSN
1475-7516

INIS

Country of Publication
United Kingdom
Country of Input or Organization
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
INIS RN
52081855
Subject category
S79: ASTROPHYSICS, COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY;
Descriptors DEI
ANISOTROPY; ANNIHILATION; BLACK HOLES; BOUNDARY CONDITIONS; COSMOLOGY; GEOMETRY; SCHWARZSCHILD METRIC; SINGULARITY; TRAJECTORIES; WAVE FUNCTIONS
Descriptors DEC
FUNCTIONS; INTERACTIONS; MATHEMATICS; METRICS; PARTICLE INTERACTIONS