Black hole tunnelling entropy and the spectrum of gravity

The tunnelling approach for entropy generation in quantum gravity is applied to black holes. The area entropy is recovered and shown to count only a tiny fraction of the black hole degeneracy. The latter stems from the extension of the wavefunction outside the barrier. In fact the semi-classical analysis leads to infinite degeneracy. Evaporating black holes then leave residual 'planckons'-Planckian remnants with infinite degeneracy. Generic planckons can neither decay into, nor be directly formed from, ordinary matter in a finite time. Quantum gravity opens up at the Planck scale into an infinite Hilbert space which is expected to provide the ultraviolet cutoff required to render the theory finite in the sector of large scale physics.