Hawking radiation

Hawking radiation is thermal emission predicted to arise from quantum fields in the curved spacetime around a black hole. It implies that black holes can lose mass and eventually evaporate.

Quantum field theory in curved spacetime: A framework describing quantum fields on a curved spacetime treated as a classical background. Hawking’s calculation applies quantum field theory to the geometry outside a black hole.
Stephen Hawking: An English theoretical physicist whose work transformed the study of black holes and cosmology. His 1974 calculation predicted that black holes emit thermal radiation.
Black hole lifetime: The time a black hole takes to evaporate through Hawking radiation, under a specified emission model. The predicted lifetime links the emission rate to a black hole’s initial mass.
Black hole information paradox: The conflict between black-hole evaporation and the quantum-mechanical requirement that information is preserved. A nearly thermal Hawking spectrum appears unable to carry away all information about matter that formed the hole.
Black hole accretion: The growth of a black hole as it captures surrounding matter and radiation. Accretion usually overwhelms Hawking emission for known astrophysical black holes.
Event horizon: A boundary beyond which events cannot send signals to distant observers. The horizon’s causal structure underlies the particle emission seen far away.
Black hole thermodynamics: The framework connecting black-hole mechanics with thermodynamic laws and quantities. Hawking radiation supplied the physical temperature needed to complete this framework.
Primordial black hole constraints: Limits on the abundance of primordial black holes inferred from observations and physical models. Evaporation predicts high-energy products that can constrain small primordial black holes.
Page curve: A proposed time profile for the entanglement entropy of radiation emitted by an evaporating black hole. Its expected turnover expresses how unitary evaporation could preserve information.
Schwinger effect: The production of particle–antiparticle pairs by a sufficiently strong electric field. It provides a different vacuum particle-production mechanism, driven by electric fields rather than horizons.

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