English

The flaw in the firewall argument

High Energy Physics - Theory 2014-05-29 v3 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

A lot of confusion surrounds the issue of black hole complementarity, because the question has been considered without discussing the mechanism which guarantees unitarity. Considering such a mechanism leads to the following: (1) The Hawking quanta with energy E of order the black hole temperature T carry information, and so only appropriate processes involving E>>T quanta can have any possible complementary description with an information-free horizon; (2) The stretched horizon describes all possible black hole states with a given mass M, and it must expand out to a distance s_{bubble} before it can accept additional infalling bits; (3) The Hawking radiation has a specific low temperature T, and infalling quanta interact significantly with it only within a distance s_{alpha} of the horizon. One finds s_{alpha} << s_{bubble} for E>>T, and this removes the argument against complementarity recently made by Almheiri et al. In particular, the condition E>>T leads to the notion of 'fuzzball complementarity', where the modes around the horizon are indeed correctly entangled in the complementary picture to give the vacuum.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1306.5488,
  title  = {The flaw in the firewall argument},
  author = {Samir D. Mathur and David Turton},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1306.5488},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

52 pages, 13 figures, v3: comments on Rindler space added, references added

R2 v1 2026-06-22T00:38:55.730Z