Unitary Rules for Black Hole Evaporation

Abstract

Hawking has proposed non-unitary rules for computing the probabilistic outcome of black hole formation. It is shown that the usual interpretation of these rules violates the superposition principle and energy conservation. Refinements of Hawking's rules are found which restore both the superposition principle and energy conservation, but leave completely unaltered Hawking's prediction of a thermal emission spectrum prior to the endpoint of black hole evaporation. These new rules violate clustering. They further imply the existence of superselection sectors, within each of which clustering is restored and a unitary $S$-matrix is shown to exist. -- This is an expanded version of a talk given at the Seventh Marcel Grossman Meeting on General Relativity, Stanford CA.

19 pages, 8 uuencoded figures, references added

References in corpus (2)

• A Possible Resolution of the Black Hole Information Puzzle
• Comment On A Proposal By Strominger

Cited by in corpus (11)

• The holographic principle
• Time Dependence of Hawking Radiation Entropy
• Quantum Mechanics of Black Holes
• Les Houches Lectures on Black Holes
• Why Aren't Black Holes Infinitely Produced?
• An Uneventful Horizon in Two Dimensions
• Soliton Induced Singularities in 2 d Gravity and their Evaporation
• Fuzzy spaces topology change as a possible solution to the black hole information loss paradox
• String Theory and Black Hole Complementarity
• Vacuum-Bounded States and the Entropy of Black Hole Evaporation
• Black Hole Information in a Detector (Atom) - Field Analog