Related papers: The subtle unphysical hypothesis of the firewall t…
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…
Hawking radiation is often intuitively visualized as particles that have tunneled across the horizon. Yet, at first sight, it is not apparent where the barrier is. Here I show that the barrier depends on the tunneling particle itself. The…
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…
Different approaches to quantum gravity conclude that black holes may possess an inner horizon, in addition to the (quantum corrected) outer `Schwarzschild' horizon. In this paper we assume the existence of this inner horizon and explain…
The past year has seen an explosion of new and old ideas about black hole physics. Prior to the firewall paper, the dominant picture was the thermofield model apparently implied by ADS/CFT duality\cite{mal2}. While some seek a narrow…
An old black hole can tunnel into a white hole/ firewall by emitting large baby universes. This phenomenon was investigated in Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) gravity for genus one. In this paper, the focus is on higher genus corresponding to…
The black hole information paradox and the black hole entropy are currently extensively researched. The consensus about the solution of the information paradox is not yet reached, and it is not yet clear what can we learn about quantum…
Black hole entropy has been shown by 't Hooft to diverge at the horizon, whereas entanglement entropy in general does not. We show that because the region near the horizon is a thermal state, entropy is linear to energy, and energy at a…
We present a further argument that typical black holes with field theory duals have firewalls at the horizon. This argument makes no reference to entanglement between the black hole and any distant system, and so is not evaded by…
We examine the basic assumptions in the original setup of the firewall paradox. The main claim is that a single mode of the lathe radiation is maximally entangled with the mode inside the horizon and simultaneously with the modes of early…
New theoretical approaches developed in the last years predict that macroscopic quantum gravity effects in black holes should lead to modifications of the gravitational wave signals expected in the framework of classical general relativity,…
During the past three decades investigators have unveiled a number of deep connections between physical information and black holes whose consequences for ordinary systems go beyond what has been deduced purely from the axioms of…
Under reasonable assumptions, black holes have been argued to form firewalls, burning up anything crossing their horizons. This argument finds that a firewall would appear very late in a black hole's lifetime, when Hawking radiation has…
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…
Recent calculations have shown that the linear proportionality between black hole entropy and area can be explained by performing a density matrix calculation for a massless free field theory. By applying the same formalism to an empirical…
The new, rapidly developing field of theoretical research --- studies of dark energy interacting with black holes (and, in particular, accreting onto black holes) --- is reviewed. The term `dark energy' is meant to cover a wide range of…
It is generally admitted that gravitational interactions become large at an invariant distance of order $1$ from the black hole horizon. We show that due to the ``atmosphere'' of high angular particles near the horizon strong gravitational…
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…
After reviewing the shortcomings of existing definitions used to characterize the boundary of a black hole, we present a new method for its characterization. This definition could potentially be applied to locate the boundary of general…
The black hole information puzzle arises from a discrepancy between conclusions drawn from general relativity and quantum theory about the nature of the radiation emitted by a black hole. According to Hawking's original argument, the…