Recently, the relation between Hawking radiation and gravitational anomalies has been used to estimate the flux of Hawking radiation for a large class of black objects. In this paper, we extend the formalism, originally proposed by Robinson and Wilczek, to the Hawking radiation of vector particles (photons). It is explicitly shown, with the Hamiltonian formalism, that the theory of an electromagnetic field on $d$-dimensional spherical black holes reduces to one of an infinite number of massive complex scalar fields on 2-dimensional spacetime, for which the usual anomaly-cancellation method is available. It is found that the total energy emitted from the horizon for the electromagnetic field is just $(d-2)$ times that for a scalar field. The results support the picture that Hawking radiation can be regarded as an anomaly eliminator on horizons. Possible extensions and applications of the analysis are discussed.

• Received 17 July 2007

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.76.084038