Related papers: Black holes, quantum information, and unitary evol…
Consistency between quantum mechanical and general relativistic views of the world is a longstanding problem, which becomes particularly prominent in black hole physics. We develop a coherent picture addressing this issue by studying the…
The aim of this work is to present the black hole information problem and discuss the assumptions and hypotheses necessary for its formulation. As the problem arises in the framework of semiclassical gravity, we first review the necessary…
We present a coherent picture of the quantum mechanics of black holes. The picture does not require the introduction of any drastically new physical effect beyond what is already known; it arises mostly from synthesizing and…
We provide general arguments regarding the connection between low-energy theories (gravity and quantum field theory) and a hypothetical fundamental theory of quantum gravity, under the assumptions of (i) validity of the holographic bound…
It has been shown that the quantum state of the graviton field outside a black hole horizon carries information about the internal state of the hole. We explain how this allows unitary evaporation: the final radiation state is a complex…
The gravity-scalar field system in spherical symmetry provides a natural setting for exploring gravitational collapse and its aftermath in quantum gravity. In a canonical approach, we give constructions of the constraint and Hamiltonian…
A key test of any quantum theory of gravity is its ability to reproduce the known thermodynamic properties of black holes. A statistical mechanical description of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy once seemed remote, but today we suffer an…
I review elements of the foundations of black-hole theory with attention to problematic issues, and describe some techniques which either seem to help with the difficulties or at least investigate their scope. The definition of black holes…
We consider the black hole information problem in an explicitly defined spacetime modelling black hole evaporation. Using this context we review basic aspects of the problem, with a particular effort to be unambiguous about subtle topics,…
This work presents an effective microscopic, time-dependent Hamiltonian framework for investigating information dynamics during black hole evaporation. While current approaches often rely on gravitational path integrals or statistical…
General relativity successfully describes space-times at scales that we can observe and probe today, but it cannot be complete as a consequence of singularity theorems. For a long time there have been indications that quantum gravity will…
Two important problems in studying the quantum black hole, namely the construction of the Hilbert space and the definition of the time evolution operator on such Hilbert space, are discussed using the de Sitter background field method for…
Some basic features of black-hole statistical mechanics are investigated, assuming that black holes respect the principles of quantum mechanics. Care is needed in defining an entropy S_bh corresponding to the number of microstates of a…
I discuss features required for preserving unitarity in black hole decay and concepts underlying such a perspective. Unitarity requires that correlations extend on the scale of the horizon. I show, in a toy model inspired by string…
A brief review of the confrontation between black hole physics and quantum-mechanical unitarity is presented. Possibile reconciliations are modifying the laws of physics to allow fundamental loss of information, escape of information during…
General features of information transfer between quantum subsystems, via unitary evolution, are investigated, with applications to the problem of information transfer from a black hole to its surroundings. A particularly direct form of…
When discussing the black hole information problem the term ``information flow'' is frequently used in a rather loose fashion. In this article I attempt to make this notion more concrete. I consider a Hilbert space which is constructed as a…
The evaporation of black holes into apparently thermal radiation poses a serious conundrum for theoretical physics: at face value, it appears that in the presence of a black hole quantum evolution is non-unitary and destroys information.…
This note is to bring to the reader's attention the fact that general relativity and quantum mechanics differ from each other in one main aspect. General relativity is based on the diffeomorphism covariant formulation of the laws of physics…
Getting the mathematical rules for quantised black holes correctly is far from straightforward. Many earlier treatises got it not quite correctly. The general relativistic transformation linking the distant observer (who only detects…