A Brief History of Hawking's Information Paradox

Abstract

In this invited review, we describe Hawking's information paradox and a recently proposed resolution of it. Explicit calculations demonstrate the existence of quantum hair on black holes, meaning that the quantum state of the external graviton field depends on the internal state of the black hole. Simple quantum mechanics then implies that Hawking radiation amplitudes depend on the internal state, resulting in a pure final radiation state that preserves unitarity and, importantly, violates a factorization assumption which is central to the original paradox. Black hole information is encoded in entangled macroscopic superposition states of the radiation.

7 pages

References in corpus (5)

• Quantum Gravitational Corrections to a Star Metric and the Black Hole Limit
• Quantum Hair from Gravity
• Quantum Hair and Black Hole Information
• Black holes, information and decoherence
• Canonical Purification of Evaporating Black Holes

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Quantum Gravitational Corrections to Particle Creation by Black Holes
• Generalized Unruh effect: A potential resolution to the black hole information paradox
• Information scrambling -- a quantum thermodynamic perspective
• Quantum Hair During Gravitational Collapse
• Nonthermal radiation of evaporating black holes
• Evaporation of a nonsingular Reissner-Nordström black hole and information loss problem
• Hawking radiation with pure states
• Towards a unitary formulation of quantum field theory in curved space-time: the case of Schwarzschild black hole
• Gravity and the Superposition Principle
• Towards a unitary formulation of quantum field theory in curved spacetime: the case of de Sitter spacetime
• Probing the Black Hole Interior with Holographic Entanglement Entropy and the Role of AdS/BCFT Correspondence
• Backreaction of stimulated Hawking radiation in an optical analogue