Speaker
Description
In 1974, Hawking published a letter in Nature that initiated
new and important lines of researches in gravitational physics. Using
quantum field theory in a spacetime with collapsing matter, he
obtained that black holes radiate as black bodies at a given
temperature which depends on the black hole parameters, now known as
the Hawking temperature. The detailed version of the Hawking radiation
was published in 1975 in the journal Communications in Mathematical
Physics. Bekenstein's earlier hypothesis that black holes are
thermodynamic objects was thus put on firm ground. This outstanding
work of Hawking, whose 50th anniversary we celebrate in the XVII Black
Holes Workshop, constitutes one of the landmarks in the foundation of
current frontiers of research, namely, quantum field theory in curved
spacetimes, semiclassical gravity, and black hole thermodynamics. In
this talk, I will give a review of Hawking radiation and a survey
of the research that sprouted from this seminal work in its fifty years.
I will venture into the challenges that are reserved for
us in this area in the next fifty years.
