English

Falling into a black hole

High Energy Physics - Theory 2008-11-26 v1

Abstract

String theory tells us that quantum gravity has a dual description as a field theory (without gravity). We use the field theory dual to ask what happens to an object as it falls into the simplest black hole: the 2-charge extremal hole. In the field theory description the wavefunction of a particle is spread over a large number of `loops', and the particle has a well-defined position in space only if it has the same `position' on each loop. For the infalling particle we find one definition of `same position' on each loop, but there is a different definition for outgoing particles and no canonical definition in general in the horizon region. Thus the meaning of `position' becomes ill-defined inside the horizon.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0705.3828,
  title  = {Falling into a black hole},
  author = {Samir D. Mathur},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0705.3828},
  year   = {2008}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-21T08:32:12.283Z