Near-horizon radiation and self-dual loop quantum gravity

We compute the near-horizon radiation of quantum black holes in the context of self-dual loop quantum gravity. For this, we first use the unitary spinor basis of SL(2, C) to decompose states of Lorentzian spin foam models into their self-dual and anti-self-dual parts, and show that the reduced density matrix obtained by tracing over one chiral component describes a thermal state at Unruh temperature. Then, we show that the analytically-continued dimension of the SU(2) Chern-Simons Hilbert space, which reproduces the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy in the large spin limit in agreement with the large spin effective action, takes the form of a partition function for states thermalized at Unruh temperature, with discrete energy levels given by the near-horizon energy of Frodden-Gosh-Perez, and with a degenerate ground state which is holographic and responsible for the entropy. Copyright (C) EPLA, 2014