Classical and Quantum Mechanics of Black Holes in Generic 2-D Dilaton Gravity

We investigate the classical and semiclassical features of generic 2D, matter-coupled, dilaton gravity theories. In particular, we show that the mass, the temperature and the flux of Hawking radiation associated with 2D black holes are invariant under dilaton-dependent Weyl rescalings of the metric. The relationship between quantum anomalies and Hawking radiation is discussed.

The study of general two dimensional models of gravity allows to tackle basic questions of quantum gravity, bypassing important technical complications which make the treatment in higher dimensions difficult. As the physically important examples of spherically symmetric Black Holes, together with string inspired models, belong to this class, valuable knowledge can also be gained for these systems in the quantum case. In the last decade new insights regarding the exact quantiz...

Based on the analysis of two dimensional dilaton gravity we argue that the semiclassical equations of black hole formation and evaporation should not be interpreted in terms of expectation values of operators in the exact quantum theory, but rather as WKB trajectories. Thus at the semiclassical level it does not seem possible to formulate a notion of {\it quantum mechanical} information loss.

We explore the thermodynamics of a general class of two dimensional dilatonic black-holes. A simple prescription is given that allows us to compute the mass, entropy and thermodynamic potentials, with results in agreement with those obtained by other methods, when available.

The entropy for two-dimensional black holes is obtained through the entropy function with the condition that the geometry approaches an $AdS_2$ spacetime in the near horizon limit. It is shown that the entropy is universal and proportional to the value of the dilaton field at the event horizon as expected. We find this universal behavior holds even after the inclusion of higher derivative terms, only modifying the proportional constant. More specifically, a variety of models ...

Black hole solutions in the context of a generic matter-coupled two-dimensional dilaton gravity theory are discussed both at the classical and semiclassical level. Starting from general assumptions, a criterion for the existence of black holes is given. The relationship between conformal anomaly and Hawking radiation is extended to a broad class of two-dimensional dilaton gravity models. A general and simple formula relating the magnitude of the Hawking effect to the dilaton ...

We relate various black hole solutions in the near-horizon region to black hole solutions in two-dimensional dilaton gravity theories in order to argue that thermodynamics of black holes in D>=4 can be effectively described by thermodynamics of black holes in two-dimensional dilaton gravity theories. We show that the Bekenstein-Hawking entropies of single-charged dilatonic black holes and dilatonic p-branes with an arbitrary dilaton coupling parameter in arbitrary spacetime d...

We study the conditions for 2-dimensional dilaton gravity models to have dynamical formation of black holes and construct all such models. Furthermore we present a parametric representation of the general solutions of the black holes.

In this talk we present the latest results from our ongoing project on geometro-thermodynamics (also known as information geometry of thermodynamics or Ruppeiner geometry) of dilaton BHs in 4D in both Einstein and string frames and a dyonic dilaton BH and at the end we report very briefly results from this approach to the 2D dilaton BHs.

There has been some recent speculation that a connection may exist between the quasinormal-mode spectra of highly damped black holes and the fundamental theory of quantum gravity. This notion follows from a conjecture by Hod that the real part of the highly damped mode frequencies can be used to calibrate the semi-classical level spacing in the black hole quantum area spectrum. However, even if the level spacing can be fixed in this manner, it still remains unclear whether th...