Related papers: Causal Patch Complementarity: The Inside Story for…
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…
The AMPS paradox challenges black hole complementarity by apparently constructing a way for an observer to bring information from the outside of the black hole into its interior if there is no drama at its horizon, making manifest a…
It has been argued that the AMPS paradox implies catastrophic breakdown of the equivalence principle in the neighborhood of a black hole horizon, or even the non-existence of any spacetime at all behind the horizon. Maldacena and the author…
It has been argued that small corrections to evolution arising from non-geometric effects can resolve the information paradox. We can get such effects, for example, from subleading saddle points in the Euclidean path integral. But an…
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…
We review recent progress on the information paradox. We explain why exponentially small correlations in the radiation emitted by a black hole are sufficient to resolve the original paradox put forward by Hawking. We then describe a…
We investigate a recent development of the black hole information problem, in which a practical paradox has been formulated to show that complementarity is insufficient. A crucial ingredient in this practical paradox is to distill…
Black Holes are unique objects which allow for meaningful theoretical studies of strong gravity and even quantum gravity effects. An infalling and a distant observer would have very different views on the structure of the world. However, a…
The black hole information paradox is really a combination of two problems: the causality paradox and the entanglement problem. The causality paradox arises because in the semiclassical approximation infalling matter gets causally trapped…
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…
The black hole information paradox is a very poorly understood problem. It is often believed that Hawking's argument is not precisely formulated, and a more careful accounting of naturally occurring quantum corrections will allow the…
We review the paradox of low energy excitations about an AdS black hole. An appropriately chosen unitary operator in the boundary theory can create a locally strong excitation near the black hole horizon, whose global energy is small as a…
Black hole firewall paradox is an inconsistency between four postulates in black hole physics: (1) the unitary evolution in quantum systems, (2) application of the semi-classical field theory in low curvature backgrounds, (3) statistical…
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…
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…
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…
Black holes have been implicated in two paradoxes that involve apparently non-unitary dynamics. According to Hawking's theory, information that is absorbed by a black hole is destroyed, and the originally pure state of a black hole is…
The information paradox in the quantum evolution of black holes is studied within the framework of the AdS/CFT correspondence. The unitarity of the CFT strongly suggests that all information about an initial state that forms a black hole is…
By entangling soft massless particles one can create an arbitrarily large amount of entanglement entropy that carries an arbitrarily small amount of energy. Dropping this entropy into the black hole (b.h.) one can increase the b.h. entropy…
The black hole information paradox is the incompatibility of quantum mechanics with the semi-classical picture of Hawking radiation. Hawking radiation appears thermal and eventually leads to the complete disappearance of a black hole.…