Black hole evaporation in the Nariai limit

Abstract:

In 1974, Stephen Hawking proposed the existence of Hawking radiation -- blackbody radiation that carries energy away from a black hole. This is thought to be the mechanism behind the evaporation of black holes. But in order for evaporation to happen, the energy needs to be able to go somewhere that is not the black hole. This talk will focus on my on-going research into the evaporation of a 1+1D Schwarzschild-de Sitter spacetime in the limit where the black hole horizon and the de Sitter horizon are degenerate (known as the Nariai limit). We investigate the (de)focusing effects caused by the energy flux of a massless, conformally coupled scalar field using one-loop effective action techniques. At present, we find that the flux does not cause the degenerate horizon to split, suggesting that a SdS black hole in the Nariai limit is stuck there, and will not evaporate.