Energy and Information Near Black Hole Horizons

Abstract

The central challenge in trying to resolve the firewall paradox is to identify excitations in the near-horizon zone of a black hole that can carry information without injuring a freely falling observer. By analyzing the problem from the point of view of a freely falling observer, I arrive at a simple proposal for the degrees of freedom that carry information out of the black hole. An infalling observer experiences the information-carrying modes as ingoing, negative energy excitations of the quantum fields. In these states, freely falling observers who fall in from infinity do not encounter a firewall, but freely falling observers who begin their free fall from a location close to the horizon are "frozen" by a flux of negative energy. When the black hole is "mined," the number of information-carrying modes increases, increasing the negative energy flux in the infalling frame without violating the equivalence principle. Finally, I point out a loophole in recent arguments that an infalling observer must detect a violation of unitarity, effective field theory, or free infall.

25 pages, 3 figures. v2: minor clarifications, references added; published version

References in corpus (9)

• Multiple Shocks
• State-Dependent Bulk-Boundary Maps and Black Hole Complementarity
• The Black Hole Interior in AdS/CFT and the Information Paradox
• The Transfer of Entanglement: The Case for Firewalls
• Singularities, Firewalls, and Complementarity
• Effective field theory models for nonviolent information transfer from black holes
• Butterflies on the Stretched Horizon
• New Concepts for Old Black Holes
• Causal Patch Complementarity: The Inside Story for Old Black Holes

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• Origin of Hawking Radiation: Firewall or Atmosphere?
• Black Holes, Entropies, and Semiclassical Spacetime in Quantum Gravity
• Effective Tolman temperature induced by trace anomaly
• Geometry of the Infalling Causal Patch
• How Much NEC Breaking Can the Universe Endure?
• The effective Tolman temperature in curved spacetimes
• Double-mixing CP violation in $B$ decays
• Semiclassical approach for the evaporating black hole revisited
• Free-fall energy density and flux in the Schwarzschild black hole