What's the (Quantum) Matter with Black Holes? Dark Energy and Condensate Stars

by Emil Mottola (Los Alamos)

Monday 8 Jun 2015, 13:15 → 14:15 Europe/Stockholm

122:026

General Relativity receives quantum corrections relevant at macroscopic distance scales and near event horizons. These arise from the conformal scalar degree of freedom generated by the trace anomaly. At event horizons the conformal anomaly scalar degree of freedom can have macroscopically large effects on the geometry, potentially removing the classical event horizon of a black hole, replacing it with a quantum boundary layer where the effective value of the gravitational vacuum energy density can change. In the full effective theory, the cosmological term becomes a dynamical condensate, whose value depends upon boundary conditions near the horizon. By taking a positive value in the interior of a fully collapsed star, the effective cosmological term removes any singularity, replacing it with a smooth dark energy interior. The resulting gravitational condensate star (or gravastar) configuration resolves all black hole paradoxes, and provides a testable alternative to black holes as the final state of complete gravitational collapse. The observed dark energy of our universe likewise may be a macroscopic finite size effect whose value depends on the cosmological horizon scale.