Moving Mirrors, Black Holes, Hawking Radiation and All That

Abstract

In this talk I show how to canonically quantize a massless scalar field in the background of a Schwarzschild black hole in Lema\^itre coordinates and then present a simplified derivation of Hawking radiation based upon this procedure. The key result of quantization procedure is that the Hamiltonian of the system is explicitly time dependent and so problem is intrinsically non-static. From this it follows that, although a unitary time-development operator exists, it is not useful to talk about vacuum states; rather, one should focus attention on steady state phenomena such as the Hawking radiation. In order to clarify the approximations used to study this problem I begin by discussing the related problem of the massless scalar field theory calculated in the presence of a moving mirror.