Characteristic time scales for the geometry transition of a black hole to a white hole from spinfoams

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Abstract Quantum fluctuations of the metric may provide a decay mechanism for black holes through a transition to a white hole geometry. 
Previous studies formulated Loop Quantum Gravity amplitudes with a view to describe this process. We identify two timescales to be extracted which we call the crossing time and the lifetime and complete a calculation that gives explicit estimates using the asymptotics of the EPRL model. The crossing time is found to scale linearly in the mass, in agreement with previous results by Ambrus and H'aj'i\v{c}ek and more recent results by Barcel'o, Carballo--Rubio and Garay. The lifetime is found to depend instead on the spread of the quantum state, and thus its dependence on the mass can take a large range of values. This indicates that the truncation/approximation used here is not appropriate to estimate this observable with any certainty. The simplest choice of a balanced semiclassical state is shown to yield an exponential scaling of the lifetime in the mass squared. Our analysis only considers 2-complexes without bulk faces, a significant limitation. In particular it is not clear how our estimates will be affected under refinements. This work should be understood as a step towards a fuller calculation in the context of covariant Loop Quantum Gravity.