Archive for March 2022

A Black Hole in Every Way

After reading Harlow's review notes on the black hole information problem, I am convinced that there could be many ways to explain the black holes information problem and black holes interior. It would be worth waiting and seeing which one is correct and which is less accurate. Here, I want to collect those possible ways of describing BHs.

  • Old Hawking Radiation: This was the idea of Hawking where he used Bekenstein entropy and implied negatively about unitarity, which later Hawking graciously accepted.
  • Complimentarity: This is a set of progressive ideas, mainly based on unitarity, purity of Hawking radiation, Einstein equivalence, and low energy EFTs. This one has exciting works from Hayden, Preskill, and Susskind.
  • AMPS: This one was put forward by Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski, and Sully in this paper. This says that four things assumed (or used as concrete builds) in complementarity cannot all be true. They propose a firewall that would incinerate information. One can say a firewall is just an extended singularity or horizon. The firewall appears to break the Einstein equivalence principle which states that any observer should not see anything unusual at horizon.
  • Fuzzballs: This is for big charged black holes where one gets fuzzball-like solutions. However, hard to find such fuzzballs in uncharged black holes.
There are a few more (of which I am not now fully aware), including the Raju-Papadodimas theory and Horowitz and Maldacena theory. It is interesting to observe that some ideas clash with others, and some just sound crazy out the well, which should only be taken with a grain of salt unless there are concrete understanding of things.

Posted in | Leave a comment Print it.

Black Holes and Information

(Some notes on black holes information problem)
At the moment, black holes and their information diary are intriguing theoretical physics problems. Starting with Hawking-Bekenstein, it is a very engaging problem, which has taken multiple routes over the course. To name a few- unitarity, holography (or AdS-CFT correspondence), and page theorem. Page theorem (and page curve) was one of the most exciting developments. 

Page curve suggests that the radiation $R$ is still maximally entangled with the remaining black hole $BH$. At the page time, both coarse-grained entropy is equal as $S_R = S_{BH}$, and after page time, as for a pure state, the entropy of the black proceeds to zero. It is very profound if you think hard about it. Page curve is a part of the hotter debate of whether infalling information is conserved in the radiation. 

Page Curve

Recovering the information (of course, this is just theoretical because an actual black hole information experiment is out of technical reach) is an arduous task and should be done quantum mechanically. I encountered Hayden and Preskill's experiment in https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.1231 (which I suggest for taking a broad view of the problem). Hayden and Preskill throw a diary in the black hole, and the diary is entangled to a system, early radiation, and black hole is entangled. After the black hole consumes the diary, in a thermalized sense, the question is how fast the information comes out. The answer, among others, is (http://arxiv.org/abs/0708.4025v2) very rapidly for black holes that have already radiated by half (in other words, black holes which have exceeded the page time). This led them to call old black holes as mirrors.

Arrangement of Hayden and Preskill's. From http://arxiv.org/abs/0708.4025v2

Posted in | Leave a comment Print it.