Related papers: Schrodinger's Cat and the Firewall
For an effective field theory in the background of an evaporating black hole with spherical symmetry, we consider non-renormalizable interactions and their relevance to physical effects. The background geometry is determined by the…
We discuss some of the drawbacks of using event horizons to define black holes and suggest ways in which black holes can be described without event horizons, using trapping horizons. We show that these trapping horizons give rise to…
The firewall paradox, a puzzle in black hole physics, depends on an implicit assumption: a rule that allows the infalling and the outside observer to combine their perspectives. However, a recent extension of the Wigner's friend paradox…
It was recently shown that a black hole (or any Killing horizon) will decohere any quantum superposition in their vicinity. I review three distinct but equivalent arguments that illustrate how this phenomenon arises: (1) entanglement with…
In this paper we argue that a firewall is simply a manifestation of an inconsistent truncation of non-perturbative effects that unitarize the semiclassical black hole. Namely, we show that a naive truncation of quantum corrections to 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…
In order to know if the Schrodinger's cat is alive or dead without opening the box, observers have to play a game with nature. The observers have to "guess" (with degrees of belief) the state of the cat due to incomplete information; in…
Firewalls in black holes are easiest to understand by imposing time reversal invariance, together with a unitary evolution law. The best approach seems to be to split up the time span of a black hole into short periods, during which no…
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…
I review elements of the foundations of black-hole theory with attention to problematic issues, and describe some techniques which either seem to help with the difficulties or at least investigate their scope. The definition of black holes…
Both AdS/CFT duality and more general reasoning from quantum gravity point to a rich collection of boundary observables that always evolve unitarily. The physical quantum gravity states described by these observables must be solutions of…
We determine coherent states peaked at classical space-time of the Schwarzschild black hole in the frame-work of canonical quantisation of general relativity. The information about the horizon is naturally encoded in the phase space…
We consider the fate of a small classical object, a "stick", as it falls through the horizon of a large black hole (BH). Classically, the equivalence principle dictates that the stick is affected by small tidal forces, and Hawking's…
We argue that the complementarity picture, as interpreted as a reference frame change represented in quantum gravitational Hilbert space, does not suffer from the "firewall paradox" recently discussed by Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski, and…
A succinct summary is given of the problem of reconciling observation of black hole-like objects with quantum mechanics. If quantum black holes behave like subsystems, and also decay, their information must be transferred to their…
We argue that the following three statements cannot all be true: (i) Hawking radiation is in a pure state, (ii) the information carried by the radiation is emitted from the region near the horizon, with low energy effective field theory…
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…
Quantum considerations have led many theorists to believe that classical black hole physics is modified not just deep inside black holes but at {\it horizon scales}, or even further outward. The near-horizon regime has just begun to be…
Following the Membrane Paradigm, we show that the stretched horizon of a black hole retains information about particles thrown into the hole for a time of order the scrambling time m ln(m/M_P), after the particles cross the horizon. One…
The Karlhede invariant is formed from the contraction of the covariant derivative of the Riemann tensor. It is a coordinate invariant that vanishes at the Schwarzschild event horizon $r=2m$. The vanishing of the invariant allows an observer…