Related papers: Unitarity and fuzzball complementarity: "Alice fuz…
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…
We comment on a recent paper of Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski and Sully who argue against black hole complementarity based on the claim that an infalling observer 'burns' as he approaches the horizon. We show that in fact measurements made…
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…
We construct a model which illustrates the conjecture of fuzzball complementarity. In the fuzzball paradigm, the black hole microstates have no interior, and radiate unitarily from their surface through quanta of energy $E\sim T$. But…
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…
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…
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…
In this note I argue that a version of complementarity is possible which evades the need for the "firewalls" recently proposed by Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski, and Sully to burn up observers falling into black hole horizons. In particular I…
The postulates of black hole complementarity do not imply a firewall for infalling observers at a black hole horizon. The dynamics of the stretched horizon, that scrambles and re-emits information, determines whether infalling observers…
Assume that there exists a fundamental theory of gravity which has a fundamental length scale and which is capable of explaining black hole evolution process fully in terms of fundamental microscopic degrees of freedom. The resultant…
The near-horizon field B of an old black hole is maximally entangled with the early Hawking radiation R, by unitarity of the S-matrix. But B must be maximally entangled with the black hole interior A, by the equivalence principle. Causal…
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,…
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.…
The fuzzball construction resolves the black hole information paradox by making spacetime end just before the horizon is reached. But if there is no traditional horizon, then do we lose the elegant relations of black hole thermodynamics?…
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…
The fuzzball proposal states that associated with a black hole of entropy S there are exp S horizon-free non-singular solutions that asymptotically look like the black hole but generically differ from the black hole up to the horizon scale.…
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…
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…
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…
A first-principles approach to the unitarity problem for black holes is systematically explored, based on the postulates of 1) quantum mechanics 2) the ability to approximately locally divide quantum gravitational systems into subsystems 3)…