What happens at the horizon?

Abstract

The Schwarzschild metric has an apparent singularity at the horizon r=2M. What really happens there? If physics at the horizon is 'normal' laboratory physics, then we run into Hawking's information paradox. If we want nontrivial structure at the horizon, then we need a mechanism to generate this structure that evades the 'no hair' conjectures of the past. Further, if we have such structure, then what would the role of the traditional black hole metric which continues smoothly past the horizon? Recent work has provided an answer to these questions, and in the process revealed a beautiful tie-up between gravity, string theory and thermodynamics.

6 pages, 3 figures (Essay awarded third prize in the Gravity Research Foundation essay competition 2013)

References in corpus (2)

• The fuzzball proposal for black holes
• Radiation from the non-extremal fuzzball

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Excluding Black Hole Firewalls with Extreme Cosmic Censorship
• Quantum Nature of Black Holes: Fast Scrambling versus Echoes
• Unitary S Matrices With Long-Range Correlations and the Quantum Black Hole
• Quantum corrections in general relativity explored through a GUP-inspired maximal acceleration analysis
• Spacing Statistics of Energy Spectra: Random Matrices, Black Hole Thermalization, and Echoes