Quantum evolution of near-extremal Reissner-Nordstrom black holes

Abstract

We study the near-horizon AdS_2\timesS^2 geometry of evaporating near-extremal Reissner-Nordstrom black holes interacting with null matter. The non-local (boundary) terms t_{\pm}, coming from the effective theory corrected with the quantum Polyakov-Liouville action, are treated as dynamical variables. We describe analytically the evaporation process which turns out to be compatible with the third law of thermodynamics, i.e., an infinite amount of time is required for the black hole to decay to extremality. Finally we comment briefly on the implications of our results for the information loss problem.