Evaporation and information puzzle for 2D nonsingular asymptotically flat black holes

Abstract

We investigate the thermodynamics and the classical and semiclassical dynamics of two-dimensional (2D), asymptotically flat, nonsingular dilatonic black holes. They are characterized by a de Sitter core, allowing for the smearing of the classical singularity, and by the presence of two horizons with a related extremal configuration. For concreteness, we focus on a 2D version of the Hayward black hole. We find a second order thermodynamic phase transition, separating large unstable black holes from stable configurations close to extremality. We first describe the black-hole evaporation process using a quasistatic approximation and we show that it ends in the extremal configuration in an infinite amount of time. We go beyond the quasistatic approximation by numerically integrating the field equations for 2D dilaton gravity coupled to N massless scalar fields, describing the radiation. We find that the inclusion of large backreaction effects (N ≫ 1) allows for an end-point extremal configuration after a finite evaporation time. Finally, we evaluate the entanglement entropy (EE) of the radiation in the quasistatic approximation and construct the relative Page curve. We find that the EE initially grows, reaches a maximum and then goes down towards zero, in agreement with previous results in the literature. Despite the breakdown of the semiclassical approximation prevents the description of the evaporation process near extremality, we have a clear indication that the end point of the evaporation is a regular, extremal state with vanishing EE of the radiation. This suggests that the nonunitary evolution, which commonly characterizes the evaporation of singular black holes, could be traced back to the presence of the singularity.