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since blackholes thermally create and emit sub-atomic particles, does spacetime govern the characteristics that particles display or does a particles characteristics form independently of spacetime?

Mike R.
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  • An electron is an electron regardless of where it is, if that's what you're asking. – Hritik Narayan Jun 28 '17 at 07:31
  • no, if a blackhole creates sub-atomic particles that fine and I get that but why doesn't it create sub-atomic particles that are foreign to this universe? – Mike R. Jun 28 '17 at 07:41
  • Hi, your point about the role of spacetme confuses me. How would you define spacetime? Have you any idea how particles would get "into" other universes? –  Jun 28 '17 at 08:36

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We describe the elementary particles using quantum field theory. For every particle there is a corresponding quantum field, so for example electrons are described by the electron field. You can think of the particles as excitations of the quantum field, so if you add energy to the electron field that energy appears as an electron. Add more energy and you get another electron, and so on.

Hawking radiation exists because when we have a curved spacetime different observers will disagree about how much energy these quantum fields have, and therefore they will disagree about the number of particles that are present. There is an attempt to explain this in more detail in my answer to An explanation of Hawking Radiation.

So Hawking radiation cannot create new and unknown types of particle because we use the types of quantum fields, and therefore the types of article, as an input to the calculation. That is, first we specify what types of particle can be present and from this we can calculate how particles of those types are created by the Hawking radiation.

John Rennie
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    "You can think of the particles as excitations of the quantum field", okay then these excitations, are they random or regular, how do you define them? – Mike R. Jun 28 '17 at 08:04
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    @MikeR. roughly, each excitation describes one particle with a certain momentum. All the other characteristics of the particle, such as mass, charge and spin, are determined by the field and are the same for all particles. So for example all electrons have the same mass, spin and charge because those are properties of the electron quantum field. Electrons differ only in their momentum. – John Rennie Jun 28 '17 at 08:24