Quantum black holes from quantum collapse

The Schwarzschild black hole can be viewed as a special case of the marginally bound Lemaître-Tolman-Bondi models of dust collapse which corresponds to a constant mass function. We presented a midisuperspace quantization of this 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 context, is naturally interpreted as the loss of information of the original matter distribution within the collapsing dust cloud.