  There have been various interpretations of Hawking radiation proposed based
on the perturbative approach, and all have confirmed Hawking's original
finding. One major conceptual challenge of Hawking evaporation is the
associated black hole information loss paradox, which remains unresolved. A key
factor to the issue is the end-stage of the black hole evaporation.
Unfortunately by then the evaporation process becomes non-perturbative. Aspired
to provide a tool for the eventual solution to this problem, here we introduce
a new interpretation of Hawking radiation as the tunneling of instantons. We
study instantons of a massless scalar field in Einstein gravity. We consider a
complex-valued instanton that connects an initial pure black hole state to a
black hole with a scalar field that represents the Hawking radiation at future
null infinity, where its action depends only on the areal entropy difference.
By comparing it with several independent approaches to Hawking radiation in the
perturbative limit, we conclude that Hawking radiation may indeed be described
by a family of instantons. Since the instanton approach can describe
non-perturbative processes, we hope that our new interpretation and holistic
method may shed lights on the information loss problem.
