Black holes and thermal Green functions

Abstract This paper concerns itself with the possibility of thermal equilibrium between a black hole and a heat bath implied by Hawking’s discovery of black hole emission. We argue that in an isolated box of radiation, for sufficiently high energy density a black hole will condense out. We introduce thermal Green functions to discuss this equilibrium and are able to extend the original arguments, that the equilibrium is possible based on fields interacting solely with the external gravitational field, to the case when mutual and self interactions are included.