Related papers: Black Holes: Complementarity or Firewalls?
Recently, Almheiri et. al. argued, via a delicate thought experiment, that it is not consistent to simultaneosuly require that (a) Hawking radiation is pure, (b) effective field theory is valid outside a stretched horizon and (c) infalling…
What happens when Alice falls into a black hole? In spite of recent challenges by Almheiri et al. -- the ""firewall" hypothesis -- the consensus on this question tends to remain "nothing special". Here I argue that something rather special…
Since their proposal, Lorentz violating theories of gravity have posed a potential threat to black hole thermodynamics, as superluminal signals appeared to be incompatible with the very black hole notion. Remarkably, it was soon realized…
This paper argues that the effect of Hawking radiation on an astrophysical black hole situated in a realistic cosmological context is not total evaporation of the black hole; rather there will always be a remnant mass. The key point is that…
We study the perception of Hawking radiation by different observers outside a black hole. The analysis is done in terms of an effective-temperature function that varies along the trajectory of each observer. The vacuum state of the…
We find radiation in an infalling frame and present an explicit analytic evidence of the failure of no drama condition by showing that an infalling observer finds an infinite negative energy density at the event horizon. The negative and…
Black holes are presumed to have an ideal ability to absorb and keep matter. Whatever comes close to the event horizon, a boundary separating the inside region of a black hole from the outside world, inevitably goes in and remains inside…
Hawking radiation is often intuitively visualized as particles that have tunneled across the horizon. Yet, at first sight, it is not apparent where the barrier is. Here I show that the barrier depends on the tunneling particle itself. The…
An effective black-hole-like horizon occurs, for electromagnetic waves in matter, at a surface of singular electric and magnetic permeabilities. In a physical dispersive medium this horizon disappears for wave numbers with $k>k_c$.…
We discuss some of the drawbacks of using event horizons to define black holes and suggest ways in which black holes can be described without event horizons, using trapping horizons. We show that these trapping horizons give rise to…
In the firewall proposal, it is assumed that the firewall lies near the event horizon and should not be observable except by infalling observers, who are presumably terminated at the firewall. However, if the firewall is located near where…
About twenty years ago Hawking made the remarkable suggestion that the black hole evaporation process will inevitably lead to a fundamental loss of quantum coherence. The mechanism by which the quantum radiation is emitted appears to be…
We present a quantum theory of black hole (and other) horizons, in which the standard assumptions of complementarity are preserved without contradicting information theoretic considerations. After the scrambling time, the quantum mechanical…
We investigate the effect of gravitational back-reaction on the black hole evaporation process. The standard derivation of Hawking radiation is re-examined and extended by including gravitational interactions between the infalling matter…
In semiclassical gravity, the vacuum expectation value ${\langle\hat{N}\rangle}$ of the particle number operator for a quantum field gives rise to the perception of thermal radiation in the vicinity of a black hole. This Hawking effect has…
Black hole complementarity posits that the interior of a black hole is not independent from its Hawking radiation. This leads to an apparent violation of causality: the interior can be acausally affected by operators acting solely on the…
The central challenge in trying to resolve the firewall paradox is to identify excitations in the near-horizon zone of a black hole that can carry information without injuring a freely falling observer. By analyzing the problem from the…
This paper considers the nature of apparent horizons for astrophysical black hole situated in a realistic cosmological context. Using semi-tetrad covariant methods we study the local evolutions of the boundaries of the trapped region in the…
We use the avoidance of the trans-Planckian problem of Hawking radiation as a guiding principle in searching for a compelling scenario for the evaporation of black holes or black-hole-like objects. We argue that there exist only three…
If a system falls through a black hole horizon, then its information is lost to an observer at infinity. But we argue that the {\it accessible} information is lost {\it before} the horizon is crossed. The temperature of the hole limits…