Quantum tunneling and black hole spectroscopy

Abstract

The entropy-area spectrum of a black hole has been a long-standing and unsolved problem. Based on a recent methodology introduced by two of the authors, for the black hole radiation (Hawking effect) as tunneling effect, we obtain the entropy spectrum of a black hole. In Einstein's gravity, we show that both entropy and area spectrum are evenly spaced. But in more general theories (like Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity), although the entropy spectrum is equispaced, the corresponding area spectrum is not.

10 pages, LaTeX, no figures; v2: 9 pages, now, title changed, minor changes to match published version in Phys. Lett. B