Related papers: The Firewall Paradox
Unitarity is a pillar of quantum theory. Nevertheless, it is also a source of several of its conceptual problems. We note that in a world where measurements are relational, as is the case in gravitation, quantum mechanics exhibits a…
To understand the information loss paradox in a consistent way, we provide a brief big picture that describes both outside and inside a black hole. We summary several ideas including the Euclidean path integral, the entanglement entropy,…
A unitary effective field model of the black hole evaporation is proposed to satisfy almost the four postulates of the black hole complementarity (BHC). In this model, we enlarge a black hole-scalar field system by adding an extra radiation…
It has been shown that the quantum state of the graviton field outside a black hole horizon carries information about the internal state of the hole. We explain how this allows unitary evaporation: the final radiation state is a complex…
A derivation of the Hawking effect is given which avoids reference to field modes above some cutoff frequency $\omega_c\gg M^{-1}$ in the free-fall frame of the black hole. To avoid reference to arbitrarily high frequencies, it is necessary…
Since Stephen Hawking's original 1975 paper on black hole evaporation, there has been a consensus that the problem of "loss of information" is both deep and troubling. It is also thought that resolution of the problem may hold some…
Quantum entanglement of Hawking radiation has been supposed to give rise to a Planck density "firewall" near the event horizon of old black holes. We show that Planck density firewalls are excluded by Einstein's equations for black holes of…
In [Found. Phys. 48.12 (2018): 1669], the notion of 'epistemic horizon' was introduced as an explanation for many of the puzzling features of quantum mechanics. There, it was shown that Lawvere's theorem, which forms the categorical…
In a recent series of papers we developed a first-principle and gauge invariant approach to black hole perturbation theory valid to any order. We included back reaction effects to tackle the situation of evaporating black holes and obtained…
In a seminal work, Hawking showed that natural states for free quantum matter fields on classical spacetimes that solve the spherically symmetric vacuum Einstein equations are KMS states of non-vanishing temperature. Although Hawking's…
We consider two approaches to evading paradoxes in quantum mechanics with closed timelike curves (CTCs). In a model similar to Politzer's, assuming pure states and using path integrals, we show that the problems of paradoxes and of…
A brief review of the confrontation between black hole physics and quantum-mechanical unitarity is presented. Possibile reconciliations are modifying the laws of physics to allow fundamental loss of information, escape of information during…
We investigate the recent black hole firewall argument. For a black hole in a typical state we argue that unitarity requires every quantum of radiation leaving the black hole to carry information about the initial state. An information-free…
A mechanism is found that explains how matter falling into the future event horizon of a black hole leaves information there, which it sends to the past event horizon, and there it determines how particles are emitted. This way information…
Black hole evaporation is one of the most striking phenomena at the interface between gravity and quantum physics. In Hawking's semi-classical treatment, where matter is quantum mechanical and the spacetime is definite and classical,…
We address proposed alternatives to the black hole firewall. We show that embedding the interior Hilbert space of an old black hole into the Hilbert space of the early radiation is inconsistent, as is embedding the semi-classical interior…
In this essay, we examine the implications of the ongoing black holes vs. firewalls debate for the thermo-field dynamics of black holes by analyzing a CFT in a thermal state in the context of AdS/CFT. We argue that the themo-field doubled…
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…
In this paper, quantum theory of a real massive scalar field in the background of a traversable wormhole is examined. The wormhole is supposed to connect two different universes; as a particular example the simplest Ellis wormhole is…
We revisit in detail the paradox of black hole information loss due to Hawking radiation as tunneling. We compute the amount of information encoded in correlations among Hawking radiations for a variety of black holes, including the…