Is Alice burning or fuzzing?

Abstract

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 "absence of drama" for an infalling observer. According to them the black hole is shielded by a firewall no later than Page time. This has generated some controversy. We find that an interesting picture emerges when we take into account objections from the advocates of fuzzballs. We reformulate AMPS' Gedankenexperiment in the decoherence picture of quantum mechanics and find that low energy wave packets interact with the radiation quanta rather violently while high energy wave packets do not. This is consistent with Mathur's recent proposal of fuzzball complementarity for high energy quanta falling into fuzzballs.

14 pages, 6 figures; v3: References added, discussions of some parts changed substantially, conclusions unaltered

References in corpus (9)

• Black holes as mirrors: quantum information in random subsystems
• The Gravity Dual of a Density Matrix
• The fuzzball proposal for black holes
• Black Holes as Effective Geometries
• Radiation from the non-extremal fuzzball
• Non-extremal Black Hole Microstates: Fuzzballs of Fire or Fuzzballs of Fuzz ?
• The Transfer of Entanglement: The Case for Firewalls
• Singularities, Firewalls, and Complementarity
• Complementarity, not Firewalls

Cited by in corpus (33)

• Time Dependence of Hawking Radiation Entropy
• Black Hole Remnants and the Information Loss Paradox
• State-Dependent Bulk-Boundary Maps and Black Hole Complementarity
• Comments on the Necessity and Implications of State-Dependence in the Black Hole Interior
• Complementarity Is Not Enough
• Non-extremal Black Hole Microstates: Fuzzballs of Fire or Fuzzballs of Fuzz ?
• The Transfer of Entanglement: The Case for Firewalls
• Is the firewall consistent?: Gedanken experiments on black hole complementarity and firewall proposal
• Unitarity and fuzzball complementarity: "Alice fuzzes but may not even know it!"
• Black Hole Complementarity and the Harlow-Hayden Conjecture
• On Reflectivity of Quantum Black Hole Horizons
• Excluding Black Hole Firewalls with Extreme Cosmic Censorship
• Operator mixing for string states in the D1-D5 CFT near the orbifold point
• Black Holes: Eliminating Information or Illuminating New Physics?
• Circuit Complexity From Cosmological Islands
• Black hole complementarity and firewall in two dimensions
• Black Hole Complementarity in Gravity's Rainbow
• An Uneventful Horizon in Two Dimensions
• Comment on the black hole firewall
• Holographic Space-time and Black Holes: Mirages As Alternate Reality
• Lagrangian constraints and renormalization of 4D gravity
• Smooth Causal Patches for AdS Black Holes
• Firewalls in AdS/CFT
• Remarks on Black Hole Evolution a la Firewalls and Fuzzballs
• Status report: black hole complementarity controversy
• Firewall or smooth horizon?
• No Holography for Eternal AdS Black Holes
• Black Holes, Entropies, and Semiclassical Spacetime in Quantum Gravity
• Echoes from beyond: Detecting gravitational-wave quantum imprints with LISA
• Still No Rindler Firewalls
• "Firewall" Phenomenology with Astrophysical Neutrinos
• Signatures of Quantum Gravity in Gravitational Wave Memory
• Note on Localized Objects as Constrained States of Holographic Variables