PhD defence: Quantum gravity on the event horizon

PLEASE NOTE: The candidate gives a layman's talk, therefore the livestream will start fifteen minutes earlier.

Modern physics is built upon two theories. The first is general relativity by Einstein, predicting the long-range movement of stars, and the existence of black holes. Black holes are super compact stars, such that not even light can escape, and have recently been directly observed for the first time. The second is quantum mechanics, which predicts the behavior of particles, like atoms and molecules, at the smallest possible scale. Quantum mechanics perfectly predicts the results of particle accelerators like CERN. So far, no observations made have disproved either of these theories.

Theoretically, this changes: Upon combining both theories, black holes do appear to send out radiation, including light. This Hawking-radiation emerges due to quantum effects on the event horizon (the boundary from which no light can escape), and causes black holes to evaporate until nothing is left. The big problem is that the vapour does not contain the same information as the original black hole; if for example the black hole was fully built out of iron, there would be no way to trace this back from the vapour. Quantum mechanics forbids this information to be lost, and hence this problem was called the information paradox.

In my research I delve into this problem deeply without invoking new physics. To be precise it is generally assumed that Hawking-radiation is not influenced by objects falling into the black hole. However, I proceed to show that by including this interaction with the infalling objects the amount of outgoing radiation increases tremendously. Because of this increase it contains a new amount of information, possibly enough to resolve the paradox. Additionally, the time we predict for evaporation of the black hole agrees with the current expectation. Therefore I have shown the solution may be found within the current two models, as long as not a single thing is neglected.