The aim of this letter is to clarify the relationships between Hawking
radiation and the scattering of light by matter falling into a black hole. To
this end we analyze the S-matrix elements of a model composed of a massive
infalling particle (described by a quantized field) and the radiation field.
These fields are coupled by current-current interactions and propagate in the
Schwarzschild geometry. As long as the photons energy is much smaller than the
mass of the infalling particle, one recovers Hawking radiation since our
S-matrix elements identically reproduce the Bogoliubov coefficients obtained by
treating the trajectory of the infalling particle classically. But after a
brief period, the energy of the `partners' of Hawking photons reaches this mass
and the production of thermal photons through these interactions stops. The
implications of this result are discussed.Comment: 12 pages, revtex, no figure
