Pith. sign in

REVIEW 4 cited by

On the quantum width of a black hole horizon

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv hep-th/0312059 v3 pith:FQJAZB2W submitted 2003-12-05 hep-th gr-qc

On the quantum width of a black hole horizon

classification hep-th gr-qc
keywords blackholecut-offentropyhorizonatmospherethermalwidth
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
read the original abstract

The many low energy modes near a black hole horizon give the thermal atmosphere a divergent entropy which becomes of order $A/4G$ with a Planck scale cut-off. However, Sorkin has given a Newtonian argument for 3+1 Schwarzschild black holes to the effect that fluctuations of such modes provide the horizon with a non-zero quantum mechanical width. This width then effectively enforces a cut-off at much larger distances so that the entropy of the thermal atmosphere is negligible in comparison with $A/4G$ for large black holes. We generalize and improve this result by giving a relativistic argument valid for any spherical black hole in any dimension. The result is again a cut-off $L_c$ at a geometric mean of the Planck scale and the black hole radius; in particular, $L_c^d \sim \frac{R}{T_H} \ell_p^{d-2}$. With this cut-off, the entropy of the thermal atmosphere is again parametrically small in comparison with the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of the black hole. The effect of a large number $N$ of fundamental fields and the discrepancies from naive predictions of a stretched horizon model are also discussed.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. JT gravity on the worldline

    hep-th 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0

    Coupling a worldline observer to JT gravity replaces its evolution operator by an exactly computed average over fluctuating Euclidean times; the fluctuations are small in the disk but large on the double trumpet.

  2. Falling through the horizon of a quantum black hole

    hep-th 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.5

    Gravitational dressing in JT gravity lets an infalling Unruh-DeWitt detector detect the horizon location and temperature locally, violating the equivalence principle without a firewall.

  3. Large Quantum Gravity Fluctuations of BTZ Black Holes

    hep-th 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Quantum width of BTZ horizon computed via holography is (G_N L_AdS^3)^{1/4}, parametrically larger than Planck scale and logarithmically divergent in the UV.

  4. Quantum Fluctuations of the Black Hole Horizon

    hep-th 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Quantum width of spherically symmetric black hole horizons is defined by signal escape timing and calculated in perturbative quantum gravity to often greatly exceed the Planck length, scaling as sqrt(l_P r_s^2 / sigma...