Black Hole Remnants and the Information Loss Paradox

By Pisin Chen, Y. Ong, Dong-han Yeom. 2014

324 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Forty years after the discovery of Hawking radiation, its exact nature remains elusive. If Hawking radiation does not carry any information out from the ever shrinking black hole, it seems that unitarity is violated once the black hole completely evaporates. On the other hand, attempts to recover information via quantum entanglement lead to the firewall controversy. Amid the confusions, the possibility that black hole evaporation stops with a “remnant” has remained unpopular and is often dismissed due to some “undesired properties” of such an object. Nevertheless, as in any scientific debate, the pros and cons of any proposal must be carefully scrutinized. We fill in the void of the literature by providing a timely review of various types of black hole remnants, and provide some new thoughts regarding the challenges that black hole remnants face in the context of the information loss paradox and its latest incarnation, namely the firewall controversy. The importance of understanding the role of curvature singularity is also emphasized, after all there remains a possibility that the singularity cannot be cured even by quantum gravity. In this context a black hole remnant conveniently serves as a cosmic censor. We conclude that a remnant remains a possible end state of Hawking evaporation, and if it contains large interior geometry, may help to ameliorate the information loss paradox and the firewall controversy. We hope that this will raise some interests in the community to investigate remnants more critically but also more thoroughly.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/094ad72ae309c2f50dc44211907d4900e38ec0d5

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. J. Polchinski
2. S. Raju

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. J. Polchinski
2. D. Harlow
3. E. Silverstein
4. D. Stanford
5. J. Maldacena
6. S. Kachru
7. Eran Palti
8. Frederik Denef

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

1. J. Polchinski
2. D. Harlow
3. D. Stanford
4. J. Maldacena
5. S. Shenker
6. S. Hartnoll
7. Zhenbin Yang
8. E. Witten

Citations in the corpus

• The Black Hole Information Problem (2016, background): “[44, 45], are saying, “we told you so!” But I see AdS/CFT as forward progress, as opposed to trying to cobble together some consistent version of quantized metrics.”