Comments on the black hole information problem

Abstract

String theory provides numerous examples of duality between gravitational theories and unitary gauge theories. To resolve the black hole information paradox in this setting, it is necessary to better understand how unitarity is implemented on the gravity side. We argue that unitarity is restored by nonlocal effects whose initial magnitude is suppressed by the exponential of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. Time-slicings for which effective field theory is valid are obtained by demanding the mutual back-reaction of quanta be small. The resulting bounds imply that nonlocal effects do not lead to observable violations of causality or conflict with the equivalence principle for infalling observers, yet implement information retrieval for observers who stay outside the black hole.

18 pages, 2 figures, revtex, v2 figure added and some improvements to presentation

Cited by in corpus (23)

• Time Dependence of Hawking Radiation Entropy
• Local bulk operators in AdS/CFT: A holographic description of the black hole interior
• Stochastic Gravity: Theory and Applications
• The arrow of time, black holes, and quantum mixing of large N Yang-Mills theories
• Is the firewall consistent?: Gedanken experiments on black hole complementarity and firewall proposal
• Quantum gravitational collapse: non-singularity and non-locality
• Quantization in black hole backgrounds
• Constructing a counterexample to the black hole complementarity
• Gravitational quasinormal modes of AdS black branes in d spacetime dimensions
• Semi-classical black holes with large N re-scaling and information loss problem
• Punctuated eternal inflation via AdS/CFT
• Quantitative approaches to information recovery from black holes
• Black holes without firewalls
• Pure states and black hole complementarity
• Entanglement, recoherence and information flow in an accelerated detector - quantum field system: Implications for black hole information issue
• Black hole complementarity: the inside view
• Black hole complementarity with local horizons and Horowitz-Maldacena's proposal
• Causal Patch Complementarity: The Inside Story for Old Black Holes
• Black hole complementarity from AdS/CFT
• Pre-Hawking radiation may allow for reconstruction of the mass distribution of the collapsing object
• The Limits of Quantum Information Scrambling
• Phenomenology of Holography via Quantum Coherence on Causal Horizons
• The Firewall Paradox