Related papers: Is the firewall consistent?: Gedanken experiments …
When gravitation is combined with quantum theory, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle could be extended to the generalized uncertainty principle accompanying a minimal length. To see how the generalized uncertainty principle works in the…
The presumption that Hawking radiations are thermally distributed can be considered to result from their entanglement with the internal degrees of freedom for a black hole. This leads to the "firewall" paradox if unitary evolution continues…
For distant observers black holes are trapped spacetime domains bounded by apparent horizons. We review properties of the near-horizon geometry emphasizing the consequences of two common implicit assumptions of semiclassical physics. The…
Black holes are probably among the most fascinating objects populating our universe. Their characteristic features found within general relativity, encompassing spacetime singularities, event horizons, and black hole thermodynamics, provide…
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…
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…
We take the view that the area of a black hole's event horizon is quantized, $A = l_P^2 \, (4 \ln 2) \, N$, and the associated degrees of freedom are finite in number and of fermionic nature. We then investigate general aspects of the…
The firewall paradox states that an observer falling into an old black hole must see a violation of unitarity, locality, or the equivalence principle. Motivated by this remarkable conflict, we analyze the causal structure of black hole…
Computational complexity is essential to understanding the properties of black hole horizons. The problem of Alice creating a firewall behind the horizon of Bob's black hole is a problem of computational complexity. In general we find that…
Recently, there have been discussions that black hole complementarity is inconsistent and that the firewall is required to prohibit the observation of duplicated information. It is thought that if the Horowitz-Maldacena proposal works as a…
The Cosmic Blackbody Background Radiation pervades the entire Universe, and so falls into every astrophysical black hole. The blueshift of the infalling photons, measured by a static observer, is infinite at the event horizon. This raises a…
The black hole final state proposal reconciles the infalling vacuum with the unitarity of the Hawking radiation, but only for some experiments. We study experiments that first verify the exterior, then the interior purification of the same…
Recently, Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski and Sully (AMPS) have suggested a Gedankenexperiment to test black hole complementarity. They claim that the postulates of black hole complementarity are mutually inconsistent and choose to give up the…
We investigate the possibility of firewalls in the Einstein-dilaton gravity model of CGHS. We use the results of the numerical simulation carried out by Ashtekar et al. to demonstrate that firewalls are absent and the horizon is drama free.…
To ask a question about a black hole in quantum gravity, one must restrict initial or boundary data to ensure that a black hole is actually present. For two-dimensional dilaton gravity, and probably a much wider class of theories as well,…
We propose that the vacuum state of a scalar field around a black hole is a modified Unruh vacuum. In (1+1) dimensions, we show that a free-faller close to such an horizon can be modelled as an inertial observer in a modified Minkowski…
Black holes appear as vacuum solutions of classical general relativity which depend on Newton's constant and possibly the cosmological constant. At the level of a quantum field theory, these coupling constants typically acquire a…
If quantum gravity does not lead to a breakdown of predictability, then Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski and Sully (AMPS) have argued that an observer falling into a black hole can perform an experiment which verifies a violation of…
The black hole information loss paradox has long been one of the most studied and fascinating aspects of black hole physics. In its latest incarnation, it takes the form of the firewall paradox. In this paper, we first give a conceptually…
Black hole entropy appears to be ``universal''--many independent calculations, involving models with very different microscopic degrees of freedom, all yield the same density of states. I discuss the proposal that this universality comes…