Related papers: Complementarity Is Not Enough
Recently, it has been argued that black hole complementarity is inconsistent by showing that, for an infalling observer, it would lead to the existence of a firewall near the black hole horizon, thereby violating the equivalence principle.…
Modes just outside the horizon of a typical old black hole are thermally entangled with distant Hawking radiation. This precludes their entangled purity with interior modes, leading to a firewall. Identifying the interior with the distant…
Black hole complementarity requires that the interior of a black hole be represented by the same degrees of freedom that describe its exterior. Entanglement plays a crucial role in the reconstruction of the interior degrees of freedom. This…
The firewall paradox is often presented as arising from double entanglement, but I argue that more generally the paradox is double purity. Near-horizon modes are purified by the interior, in the infalling vacuum. Hence they cannot also be…
Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski, and Sully, recently claimed that once a black hole has radiated more than half its initial entropy (the Page time), the horizon is replaced by a "firewall" at which infalling observers burn up, in apparent…
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…
To implement the consistent black hole complementarity principle, we need two assumptions: first, there exists a singularity near the center, and second, global horizons are the same as local horizons. However, these assumptions are not…
Unitary black hole evaporation necessarily involves a late-time superposition of decoherent states, including states describing distinct spacetimes (e.g., different center of mass trajectories of the black hole). Typical analyses of the…
Horowitz and Maldacena have suggested that the unitarity of the black hole S-matrix can be reconciled with Hawking's semiclassical arguments if a final-state boundary condition is imposed at the spacelike singularity inside the black hole.…
Interest in the black hole information paradox has recently been catalyzed by the newer "firewall" argument. The crux of the updated argument is that previous solutions which relied on observer complementarity are in violation of the…
We investigate the recent black hole firewall argument. For a black hole in a typical state we argue that unitarity requires every quantum of radiation leaving the black hole to carry information about the initial state. An information-free…
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…
The black hole firewall conjecture is based on Page curve hypothesis, which claims that entanglement between black hole and Hawking radiation is almost maximum. The hypothesis is inspired by Lubkin-Lloyd-Pagels-Page theorem for degenerate…
It was recently argued by Almheiri et al that black hole complementarity strains the basic rules of quantum information theory, such as monogamy of entanglement. Motivated by this argument, we develop a practical framework for describing…
We demonstrate that wormholes must be entangled regardless of asymptotic boundary conditions. Assuming black hole complementarity, we argue that traversable wormholes instantiate entanglement-assisted quantum channels and that this…
We propose an S matrix approach to the quantum black hole in which causality, unitarity and their interrelation play a prominent role. Assuming the 't Hooft S matrix ansatz for a gravitating region surrounded by an asymptotically flat…
Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski, and Sully argued that, for a consistent black hole evaporation process, the horizon of a sufficiently old black hole should be replaced by a "firewall" at which an infalling observer burns up, which obviously…
The radiation emitted by a black hole (BH) during its evaporation has to have some degree of quantum coherence to accommodate a unitary time evolution. We parametrize the degree of coherence by the number of coherently emitted particles…
We discuss how under certain conditions the black hole information puzzle and the (related) arguments that firewalls are a typical feature of black holes can break down. We first review the arguments of AMPS favoring firewalls, focusing on…
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…