Date of Submission

Spring 2017

Academic Programs and Concentrations

Mathematics; Physics

Project Advisor 1

Hal Haggard

Project Advisor 2

Ethan Bloch

Abstract/Artist's Statement

In recent years, there has been growing interest in models of black holes quantum tunneling into white holes. Shells of matter or energy could be sufficiently affected by quantum gravity at Planckian density to end their collapse before reaching a singularity, and bounce out in finite time. Existing work examines the collapse scenario in the Schwarzschild metric of a static black hole to make use of the full set of spherical symmetries for analytic solutions of both the location of maximal quantum effects and time-frames over which these effects become significant. This thesis expands the analysis to the Kerr metric of a rotating black hole. Most, if not all, astrophysical black holes are expected to have angular momentum, so a more general treatment is of both theoretical and phenomenological interest. We derive the full set of null geodesics in the Kerr metric and set up an exact function that gives a dimensionless measure of the strength of quantum effects, and are still able to analytically isolate regions of maximal quantum effects. We turn to numerical analysis to characterize cases of interest. We are able to prove in the Kerr metric that there is still an absolute maximum for the quantum effects outside of the event horizon.

Open Access Agreement

On-Campus only

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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