Entropy Generation in Quantum Gravity and Black Hole Remnants

Abstract

The area entropy $A/4$ and the related Hawking temperature in the presence of event horizons are rederived, for de Sitter and black hole topologies, as a consequence of a tunneling of the wave functional associated to the classical coupled matter and gravitational fields. The extension of the wave functional outside the barrier provides a reservoir of quantum states which allows for an additive constant to $A/4$. While, in a semi-classical analysis, this gives no new information in the de Sitter case, it yields an infinite constant in the black hole case. Evaporating black holes would then leave residual ``planckons" - Planckian remnants with infinite degeneracy. Generic planckons can neither decay into, nor be directly formed from, ordinary matter in a finite time. Such opening at the Planck scale of an infinite Hilbert space is expected to provide the ultraviolet cutoff required to render the theory finite in the sector of large scale physics.