Related papers: An Apologia for Firewalls
The AMPS firewall argument relies on treating early radiation, late outgoing Hawking modes, and interior partner modes as approximately independent quantum subsystems. In diffeomorphism-invariant quantum gravity, however, gravitational…
The AMPS argument for black hole firewalls seems to arise not only from the assumption of local effective field theory outside the stretched horizon but also from an overcounting of internal black hole states that include states that are…
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…
Large black holes in an asymptotically AdS spacetime have a dual description in terms of approximately thermal states in the boundary CFT. The reflecting boundary conditions of AdS prevent such black holes from evaporating completely. On…
It is generally believed that the eternal AdS black hole is dual to two conformal field theories with compact spatial sections that are together in a thermofield double state. We argue that this proposal is incorrect, and by extension so…
In this paper we discuss quantum computational restrictions on the types of thought experiments recently used by Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski, and Sully to argue against the smoothness of black hole horizons. We argue that the quantum…
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…
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…
We study a simple version of the AdS/CFT (anti-de Sitter spacetime/Conformal Field Theory) correspondence, where operators have integer conformal dimensions. In this model, bulk causality follows from boundary analyticity, even in…
We propose a CFT definition of local observables in both the exterior and interior of bulk black holes, whenever such an interior exists. We achieve this by introducing a small microcanonical black hole as a "probe" and using its modular…
In this note I elaborate on some features of a recent proposal of Papadodimas and Raju for a CFT description of the interior of a one-sided AdS black hole in a pure state. I clarify the treatment of 1/N corrections, and explain how the…
There has been much discussion on the possibility of firewalls at the horizon-scale in black hole physics, including questions regarding the presence or absence of firewalls at apparent horizons, such as the Rindler horizon and the horizon…
We argue that the resolution to the black hole information paradox lies in a proper accounting of the implications of diffeomorphism invariance for the Hilbert space and observables of quantum gravity. The setting of asymptotically Anti-de…
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…
We study the minimal surfaces between two of the multiple boundaries of 3d maximally extended rotating eternal black hole. Via AdS/CFT, this corresponds to investigating the behavior of entanglements of the boundary CFT with multiple…
Recently, Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski, and Sully found that for a sufficiently old black hole (BH), the set of assumptions known as the \emph{complementarity postulates} appears to be inconsistent with the assumption of local regularity at…
The black hole information problem has been a challenge since Hawking's original 1975 paper. It led to the discovery of AdS/CFT, which gave a partial resolution of the paradox. However, recent developments, in particular the firewall…
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…
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…
Black hole complementarity, as originally formulated in the 1990's by Preskill, 't Hooft, and myself is now being challenged by the Almheiri-Marolf-Polchinski-Sully firewall argument. The AMPS argument relies on an implicit assumption---the…