On dispersion relations and the statistical mechanics of Hawking radiation

Abstract

We analyze the interplay between dispersion relations for the spectrum of Hawking quanta and the statistical mechanics of such a radiation. We first find the general relation between the occupation number density and the energy spectrum of Hawking quanta and then study several cases in details. We show that both the canonical and the microcanonical picture of the evaporation lead to the same linear dispersion relation for relatively large black holes. We also compute the occupation number obtained by instead assuming that the spectrum levels out (and eventually falls to zero) for very large momenta and show that the luminosity of black holes is not appreciably affected by the modified statistics.