Tunneling between single and multi-centered black hole configurations

Abstract

We find a gravitational instanton that connects an initial state corresponding to a single-centered extremal Reissner-Nordstrom (ERN) black hole configuration, to a final state corresponding to a multi-centered configuration. This instanton is interpreted as describing quantum tunneling between the two different black hole solutions. We evaluate the Euclidean action for this instanton and find that the amplitude for the tunneling process is equal to half the difference in entropy between the initial and final configurations.