English

Is the firewall consistent?: Gedanken experiments on black hole complementarity and firewall proposal

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2015-06-11 v3 High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the black hole complementarity and the firewall proposal at length. Black hole complementarity is inevitable if we assume the following five things: unitarity, entropy-area formula, existence of an information observer, semi-classical quantum field theory for an asymptotic observer, and the general relativity for an in-falling observer. However, large N rescaling and the AMPS argument show that black hole complementarity is inconsistent. To salvage the basic philosophy of the black hole complementarity, AMPS introduced a firewall around the horizon. According to large N rescaling, the firewall should be located close to the apparent horizon. We investigate the consistency of the firewall with the two critical conditions: the firewall should be near the time-like apparent horizon and it should not affect the future infinity. Concerning this, we have introduced a gravitational collapse with a false vacuum lump which can generate a spacetime structure with disconnected apparent horizons. This reveals a situation that there is a firewall outside of the event horizon, while the apparent horizon is absent. Therefore, the firewall, if it exists, not only does modify the general relativity for an in-falling observer, but also modify the semi-classical quantum field theory for an asymptotic observer.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1210.6733,
  title  = {Is the firewall consistent?: Gedanken experiments on black hole complementarity and firewall proposal},
  author = {Dong-il Hwang and Bum-Hoon Lee and Dong-han Yeom},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1210.6733},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

40 pages, 12 figures. Including of a review of verbatim material from arXiv:0907.0677

R2 v1 2026-06-21T22:27:30.063Z