Black Holes have always played a central role in investigations of quantum
gravity. This includes both conceptual issues such as the role of classical
singularities and information loss, and technical ones to probe the consistency
of candidate theories. Lacking a full theory of quantum gravity, such studies
had long been restricted to black hole models which include some aspects of
quantization. However, it is then not always clear whether the results are
consequences of quantum gravity per se or of the particular steps one had
undertaken to bring the system into a treatable form. Over a little more than
the last decade loop quantum gravity has emerged as a widely studied candidate
for quantum gravity, where it is now possible to introduce black hole models
within a quantum theory of gravity. This makes it possible to use only quantum
effects which are known to arise also in the full theory, but still work in a
rather simple and physically interesting context of black holes. Recent
developments have now led to the first physical results about non-rotating
quantum black holes obtained in this way. Restricting to the interior inside
the Schwarzschild horizon, the resulting quantum model is free of the classical
singularity, which is a consequence of discrete quantum geometry taking over
for the continuous classical space-time picture. This fact results in a change
of paradigm concerning the information loss problem. The horizon itself can
also be studied in the quantum theory by imposing horizon conditions at the
level of states. Thereby one can illustrate the nature of horizon degrees of
freedom and horizon fluctuations. All these developments allow us to study the
quantum dynamics explicitly and in detail which provides a rich ground to test
the consistency of the full theory.Comment: 45 pages, 4 figures, chapter of "Trends in Quantum Gravity Research"
(Nova Science