Related papers: Why Firewalls Need Not Exist
A coherent picture of the quantum mechanics of a collapse-formed, evaporating black hole is presented. In a distant frame, semiclassical theory in the zone describes microscopic dynamics of only the "hard modes," the modes that are hard…
Behind certain marginally trapped surfaces one can construct a geometry containing an extremal surface of equal, but not larger area. This construction underlies the Engelhardt-Wall proposal for explaining Bekenstein-Hawking entropy as a…
We provide evidence that strong quantum entanglement between Hilbert spaces does not generically create semiclassical wormholes between the corresponding geometric regions in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. We propose 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…
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 Bekenstein-Hawking formula relates the black hole entropy and horizon area. Semiclassical entropy computations have relied on an action principle that fixes a gauge dependent and classically unobservable boundary three-geometry and…
Constraints on the geometries of static spherically symmetric black holes are obtained by requiring that the spacetime curvature be analytic at the event horizon. Further constraints are obtained by requiring that the semiclassical trace…
The process of black hole evaporation resulting from the Hawking effect has generated an intense controversy regarding its potential conflict with quantum mechanics' unitary evolution. In a recent couple of works of a collaboration…
The black-hole information paradox provides one of the sharpest foci for the conflict between quantum mechanics and general relativity and has become the proving-ground of would-be theories of quantum gravity. String theory has made…
General relativity predicts its own demise at singularities, but also appears to conveniently shield itself from the catastrophic consequences of such singularities, making them safe. For instance, if strong cosmic censorship were…
We investigate the black hole information paradox in the setting of pseudo-complex gravity, a covariant geometric extension of general relativity that introduces a minimal length scale by deforming the spacetime manifold. In this framework,…
We investigate the possibility of firewalls in the Einstein-dilaton gravity model of CGHS. We use the results of the numerical simulation carried out by Ashtekar et al. to demonstrate that firewalls are absent and the horizon is drama free.…
The black hole information loss paradox has plagued physicists since Hawking's discovery that black holes evaporate thermally in contradiction to the unitarity expected by quantum mechanics. Here we show that one of the central presumptions…
A common belief is that further quantum corrections near the singularity of a large black hole should not substantially modify the semiclassical picture of black hole evaporation; in particular, the outgoing spectrum of radiation should be…
We discuss the black hole information problem, including the recent claim that unitarity requires a horizon firewall, emphasizing the role of decoherence and macroscopic superpositions. We consider the formation and evaporation of a large…
We examine the pair creation of black holes in the presence of supergravity domain walls with broken and unbroken supersymmetry. We show that black holes will be nucleated in the presence of non- extreme, repulsive walls which break the…
We consider three fundamental issues in quantum gravity: (a) the black hole information paradox (b) the unboundedness of entropy that can be stored inside a black hole horizon (c) the relation between the black hole horizon and the…
The concept of transparent and opaque horizons is defined. One example of opaqueness is the presence of a firewall. Two apparently contradictory statements are reconciled: The overwhelming number of black hole states have opaque horizons;…
Black holes are extremely relativistic objects. Physical processes around them occur in a regime where the gravitational field is extremely intense. Under such conditions, our representations of space, time, gravity, and thermodynamics are…
The black hole information paradox is the result of contradiction between Hawking's semi-classical argument, which dictates that the quantum coherence should be lost during the black hole evaporation and the fundamental principles of…