This book presents a comprehensive review of the subject of gravitational effects in quantum field theory. Although the treatment is general, special emphasis is given to the Hawking black hole evaporation effect, and to particle creation processes in the early universe. The last decade has witnessed a phenomenal growth in this subject. This is the first attempt to collect and unify the vast literature that has contributed to this development. All the major technical results are presented, and the theory is developed carefully from first principles. Here is everything that students or researchers will need to embark upon calculations involving quantum effects of gravity at the so-called one-loop approximation level.

Abstract. The procedure used recently by Hawking to demonstrate the creation of massless particles by black holes is applied to the Rindler coordinate system in flat space-time. The result is that an observer who undergoes a uniform acceleration K apparently sees a fixed surface radiate with a temperature of ~/27t. Some implications of this result are discussed.

We examine the modes of a scalar field in de Sitter space and construct quantum two-point functions. These are then used to compute a finite stress tensor by the technique of covariant point-splitting. We propose a renormalization ansatz based on the DeWitt-Schwinger expansion, and show that this removes all am biguities previously present in pointsplitting regularization. The results agree in detail with previous work by dimensional regularization, and give rise to an anomalous trace with the conventional coefficient. We describe how’ our treatment may be extended to more general situations.

%'e calculate the vacuum expectation value, T"", of the energy-momentum tensor of a massless scalar field in a general two-dimensional spacetime and evaluate it in a two-dimensional model of gravitational collapse. In two dimensions, quantum radiation production is incompatible with a conserved and traceless T"".We therefore resolve an ambiguity in our expression for T~", regularized by a geodesic point-separation procedure, by demanding conservation but allowing a trace. In the collapse model, the results support that picture of black-hole evaporation in which pairs of particles are created outside the horizon (and not entirely in the collapsing matter), one of which carries negative energy into the future horizon of the black hole, while the other contributes to the thermal flux at infinity.

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