Horizon-Scale Corrections to Black Hole Geometry from a Conserved Quantum Atmosphere

Abstract:Black holes are usually described either as classical geometries on which quantum fields propagate or as objects whose complete quantum description lies beyond semiclassical gravity. Hawking radiation already shows, however, that a black hole is not an exactly isolated system: the horizon carries a thermal scale and, after coarse graining, may be associated with fluctuations, dissipation and environmental correlations. Whether this horizon-scale openness can be encoded directly in the gravitational background, before any stochastic treatment of the metric, remains an open question. Here we answer it by introducing, for the first time, a conserved Hawking-scale anisotropic source representing the coarse-grained near-horizon atmosphere and solving the Einstein equations for a static black hole at fixed ADM mass. The dressed geometry has a renormalized mass function, a self-consistently shifted horizon and a modified surface gravity. Because the same lapse governs the horizon and timelike geodesics, the thermal response is accompanied by a correlated orbital restructuring: the effective potential is renormalized, the ISCO moves inward and the near-horizon residence time increases. The construction adds no Langevin force to a fixed Schwarzschild background; rather, it defines a deterministic dressed mean geometry, providing a controlled background on which stochastic metric fluctuations may subsequently be treated in the Einstein-Langevin framework. This establishes the deterministic mean-field sector as the necessary first step for future stochastic gravity programs addressing horizon-scale openness.

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc); Space Physics (physics.space-ph); Quantum Physics (quant-ph)

arXiv:2610.07934 [gr-qc]

(or arXiv:2610.07934v1 [gr-qc] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.07934 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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