Acoustic Firewalls: Analogue Gravity Perspective on the AMPS Paradox

Abstract

The monogamy of quantum entanglement, applied by Almheiri-Marolf-Polchinski-Sully (AMPS) to black holes, obstructs a smooth horizon vacuum after the Page time. We transcribe this argument to Hawking-like phonon radiation from a sonic horizon in the Unruh acoustic metric. An exact purity identity shows that post-Page-time unitarity forces the entanglement between an outgoing phonon and its interior partner to vanish, selecting a non-Hadamard (Boulware-like) phonon state, which we define as an acoustic firewall. Its renormalized stress tensor differs from the smooth state by a constant, negative near-horizon flux, and the thermal-atmosphere energy density it removes, measured by a static calorimeter, grows as $(\delta r{)}^{-2}$ in the radial coordinate toward the horizon (singular in the free-fall frame), cut off at the healing length. The construction is kinematic and does not resolve the information paradox; it yields one concrete, falsifiable prediction: a differential phonon-calorimetry signal $\mathcal{R}(\delta r)=|\Delta \mathcal{E}|/{\mathcal{E}}^{(0)}\to ({\ell }_{\kappa }/\delta r{)}^2$, present only after the analogue Page time in a Bose-Einstein condensate.

Combined Letter and Supplemental Material (8 pages, 6 figures, 1 table). v2: references added, affiliation of S.N.A. updated. Submitted to Phys. Rev. Lett. Code and data: Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.21269544