Reduced Hamiltonian for intersecting shells

Abstract

The gauge usually adopted for extracting the reduced Hamiltonian of a thin spherical shell of matter in general relativity, becomes singular when dealing with two or more intersecting shells. We introduce here a more general class of gauges which is apt for dealing with intersecting shells. As an application we give the hamiltonian treatment of two intersecting shells, both massive and massless. Such a formulation is applied to the computation of the semiclassical tunneling probability of two shells. The probability for the emission of two shells is simply the product of the separate probabilities thus showing no correlation in the emission probabilities in this model.