Black holes and running couplings: A comparison of two complementary approaches

Abstract

Black holes appear as vacuum solutions of classical general relativity which depend on Newton's constant and possibly the cosmological constant. At the level of a quantum field theory, these coupling constants typically acquire a scale-dependence. This proceedings briefly summarizes two complementary ways to incorporate this effect: the renormalization group improvement of the classical black hole solution based on the running couplings obtained within the gravitational Asymptotic Safety program and the exact solution of the improved equations of motion including an arbitrary scale dependence of the gravitational couplings. Remarkably the picture of the "quantum" black holes obtained from these very different improvement strategies is surprisingly similar.