Factorization of unitarity and black hole firewalls

Abstract

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 black hole information problem, including the argument for the existence of firewalls, assume approximate unitarity ("factorization of unitarity") on each of the decoherent spacetimes. This factorization assumption is non-trivial, and indeed may be incorrect. We describe an ansatz for the radiation state that violates factorization and which allows unitarity and the equivalence principle to coexist (no firewall). Unitarity without factorization provides a natural realization of the idea of black hole complementarity.

4 pages revtex; v2 added discussion of dimensionality of BH internal Hilbert space

References in corpus (2)

• Black holes, information and decoherence
• Macroscopic superpositions and black hole unitarity

Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Excluding Black Hole Firewalls with Extreme Cosmic Censorship
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• Smooth Causal Patches for AdS Black Holes
• Black Holes, Entropies, and Semiclassical Spacetime in Quantum Gravity