Gravitational Anomalies, Hawking Radiation, and Spherically Symmetric Black Holes

Abstract

Motivated by the recent work of Robinson and Wilczek, we evaluate the gravitational anomaly of a chiral scalar field in a Vaidya spacetime of arbitrary mass function, and thus the outgoing flux from the time-dependent horizon in that spacetime. We show that this flux differs from that of a perfect blackbody at a fixed temperature. When this flux is taken into account, general covariance in that spacetime is restored. We also generalize their results to the most general static, and spherically symmetric spacetime.