English

Firewalls as artefacts of inconsistent truncations of quantum geometries

High Energy Physics - Theory 2016-12-21 v4 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

In this paper we argue that a firewall is simply a manifestation of an inconsistent truncation of non-perturbative effects that unitarize the semiclassical black hole. Namely, we show that a naive truncation of quantum corrections to the Hawking spectrum at order O(eS){\cal O}(e^{-S}), inexorably leads to a "localised'' divergent energy density near the black hole horizon. Nevertheless, in the same approximation, a distant observer only sees a discretised spectrum and concludes that unitarity is achieved by O(eS){\cal O}(e^{-S}) effects. This is due to the fact that instead, the correct quantum corrections to the Hawking spectrum go like O(gtteS){\cal O}( g^{tt} e^{-S}). Therefore, while at a distance far away from the horizon, where gtt1g^{tt}\approx 1, quantum corrections {\it are} perturbative, they {\it do} diverge close to the horizon, where gttg^{tt}\rightarrow \infty. Nevertheless, these "corrections" nicely re-sum so that correlations functions are smooth at the would-be black hole horizon. Thus, we conclude that the appearance of firewalls is just a signal of the breaking of the semiclassical approximation at the Page time, even for large black holes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1502.03129,
  title  = {Firewalls as artefacts of inconsistent truncations of quantum geometries},
  author = {Cristiano Germani and Debajyoti Sarkar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.03129},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

v4: explanation about the failure of the saddle point approximation and general clarifications added