The Interior of a Unitarily Evaporating Black Hole

Abstract

We study microscopic operators describing the experience of an observer falling into the horizon of a unitarily evaporating black hole. For a young black hole, these operators can be taken to act only on the degrees of freedom in the black hole region: the soft---or stretched horizon---modes as well as the semiclassical modes in the zone region. On the other hand, for an old black hole, the operators must also involve radiation emitted earlier; the difference between the two cases comes from statistics associated with the coarse-graining performed to obtain the effective theory of the interior. We find that the operators relevant for the interior theory can be defined globally as standard linear operators throughout the microstates, which obey the correct algebra up to corrections exponentially suppressed in the ratio of excitation energy to the Hawking temperature. We conjecture that the existence of such global operators is required for the emergence of the semiclassical picture. We also elucidate relation between the present construction and entanglement wedge reconstruction of the interior.

26 pages, 1 figure; v4: significantly expanded---revised analysis of a large AdS black hole, added discussions on the role of the energy criterion and relation to other work; v5: clarified discussion on relation to entanglement wedge reconstruction and islands, matches published version

References in corpus (5)

• Black holes as mirrors: quantum information in random subsystems
• The Page curve of Hawking radiation from semiclassical geometry
• Relative entropy and the Bekenstein bound
• The ghost in the radiation: Robust encodings of the black hole interior
• Spacetime and Universal Soft Modes --- Black Holes and Beyond

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• Soft black hole information paradox: Page curve from Maxwell soft hair of a black hole
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• Holographic moving mirrors
• Unitarity and the information problem in an explicit model of black hole evaporation