Vacuum Polarization and Persistence on the Black Hole Horizon

Abstract

We find the exact one-loop effective action in a Schwarzschild black hole in the proper-time integral from the Schwinger variational principle, which has the same form up to number of states as the Heisenberg-Euler and Schwinger QED effective action in a constant electric field. The leading term for Hawking radiation comes from the first simple pole of the vacuum polarization and the sum of residues from all simple poles exactly leads to the vacuum persistence. We show that the vacuum persistence is the total flux of Hawking radiation for bosons and fermions and the vacuum polarization has an expression of thermal distribution and the propagator.