Hawking Radiation

1-Which one of the 4 fundamental forces is responsible for black hole evaporation (where matter is moved out of black hole) or quantum leap (where matter is moved to a different orbit)?
- Mehran
Miami, Florida

The evaporation of black holes should be almost completely dominated by electromagnetic processes until the very brief poof of energy at the end, in which other forces become involved. The reason is that photons have no rest mass, so that low-temperature (large) black holes can emit some photon radiation. Radiation of massive particles is almost completely shut down until the temperature is high enough for the thermal energy scale to be comparable to the particle rest energy.

I'm not sure what process you're referring to by "quantum leap". The specific sorts of events that Bohr envisioned when he used that term do not seem to exist.

Mike W.

(published on 07/17/2010)