On the Hawking radiation as tunneling for a class of dynamical black holes

The instability against emission of massless particles by the trapping horizon of an evolving black hole is analyzed with the use of the Hamilton-Jacobi method. The method automatically selects one special expression for the surface gravity of a changing horizon. Indeed, the strength of the horizon singularity turns out to be governed by the surface gravity as was defined a decade ago by Hayward using Kodama's theory of spherically symmetric gravitational fields. The theory also applies to point masses embedded in an expanding universe, were the surface gravity is still related to Kodama-Hayward theory. As a bonus of the tunneling method, we gain the insight that the surface gravity still defines a temperature parameter as long as the evolution is sufficiently slow that the black hole pass through a sequence of quasi-equilibrium states. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.