Stimulated Emission of Radiation and the Black Hole Information Problem
arXiv:2306.13845 · doi:10.1016/j.aop.2024.169739
Abstract
The quantum theory of black holes has opened up a window to study the intersection of general relativity and quantum field theory, but perceived paradoxes concerning the fate of classical information directed at a black hole horizon, as well as concerning the unitarity of the evaporation process, have led researchers to question the very foundations of physics. In this pedagogical review I clarify the ramifications of the fact that black holes not only emit radiation spontaneously, but also respond to infalling matter and radiation by emitting approximate clones of those fields in a stimulated manner. I review early purely statistical arguments based on Einstein's treatment of black bodies, and then show that the Holevo capacity of the black hole (the capacity to transmit classical information through a quantum channel) is always positive. I then show how stimulated emission turns the black hole into an almost optimal quantum cloning machine, and furthermore discuss the capacity of black holes to transmit quantum information. Taking advantage of an analogy between black hole physics and non-linear optics I show that a calculation of the evolution of a black hole over time, using a discretization of the black hole -matrix path integral, yields well-behaved Page curves suggesting that black hole evaporation is unitary. Finally, I speculate about possible observable consequences of stimulated emission of radiation in black holes.
arXiv comment40 pages, 21 figures
References in corpus (41)
- Gaussian Quantum Information
- Good Quantum Error-Correcting Codes Exist
- Black holes as mirrors: quantum information in random subsystems
- Information in Black Hole Radiation
- Quantum Copying: Beyond the No-Cloning Theorem
- Evanescent Black Holes
- The Page curve of Hawking radiation from semiclassical geometry
- Optimal Quantum Cloning Machines
- Quantum cloning
- Measurement of stimulated Hawking emission in an analogue system
- Optimal Universal and State-Dependent Quantum Cloning
- Negative entropy and information in quantum mechanics
- Information transmission through a noisy quantum channel
- Observation of self-amplifying Hawking radiation in an analog black hole laser
- Observation of thermal Hawking radiation at the Hawking temperature in an analogue black hole
- Quantum Communication With Zero-Capacity Channels
- The mother of all protocols: Restructuring quantum information's family tree
- Information Loss
- Spin flips and quantum information for anti-parallel spins
- Monte Carlo evaluation of path integrals for the nuclear shell model
- On the von Neumann capacity of noisy quantum channels
- Quantum Hair on Black Holes
- Optimal Quantum Cloning via Stimulated Emission
- Observation of stationary spontaneous Hawking radiation and the time evolution of an analogue black hole
- One-mode Bosonic Gaussian channels: a full weak-degradability classification
- Optimal cloning of coherent states with a linear amplifier and beam splitters
- Entropic Bell Inequalities
- Optical implementation of continuous-variable quantum cloning machines
- How Fast Does Information Leak out from a Black Hole?
- Conjugate Degradability and the Quantum Capacity of Cloning Channels
- The Trilinear Hamiltonian: A Zero Dimensional Model of Hawking Radiation from a Quantized Source
- An Infinite Sequence of Additive Channels: the Classical Capacity of Cloning Channels
- Equivalence Relations for the Classical Capacity of Single-Mode Gaussian Quantum channels
- The capacity of black holes to transmit quantum information
- Black holes as bosonic Gaussian channels
- Black holes are almost optimal quantum cloners
- One-shot decoupling and Page curves from a dynamical model for black hole evaporation
- Is it possible to recover information from the black-hole radiation?
- Parametric down conversion with a depleted pump as a model for classical information transmission capacity of quantum black holes
- Coherent information of one-mode Gaussian channels -- the general case of nonzero added classical noise
- Quantum information theory of the Bell-state quantum eraser