Quantum black holes from quantum collapse - art. no. 084005

The Schwarzschild black hole can be viewed as a special case of the margina lly bound Lemaitre-Tolman-Bondi models of dust collapse which corresponds t o a constant mass function. We presented a midisuperspace quantization of t his model for an arbitrary mass function in a separate publication. In this article we show that our solution leads both to Bekenstein's area spectrum for black holes as well as to the black hole entropy, which, in this conte xt, is naturally interpreted as the loss of information of the original mat ter distribution within the collapsing dust cloud.