An apologia for firewalls

By Ahmed Almheiri, D. Marolf, J. Polchinski, D. Stanford, J. Sully. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2013

502 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We address claimed alternatives to the black hole firewall. We show that embedding the interior Hilbert space of an old black hole into the Hilbert space of the early radiation is inconsistent, as is embedding the semi-classical interior of an AdS black hole into any dual CFT Hilbert space. We develop the use of large AdS black holes as a system to sharpen the firewall argument. We also reiterate arguments that unitary non-local theories can avoid firewalls only if the non-localities are suitably dramatic.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0b0210583bd9f3a430959e2b323a247757a54711

How researchers see this paper

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

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. D. Harlow
2. S. Raju
3. D. Stanford
4. R. Myers
5. J. Maldacena
6. S. Shenker
7. L. Susskind
8. V. Hubeny

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. D. Harlow
2. S. Raju
3. R. Myers
4. D. Stanford
5. J. Maldacena
6. S. Shenker
7. L. Susskind
8. V. Hubeny

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

1. D. Harlow
2. S. Raju
3. D. Stanford
4. R. Myers
5. J. Maldacena
6. S. Shenker
7. Ahmed Almheiri
8. V. Hubeny

Citations in the corpus

• Relative entropy equals bulk relative entropy (2015, background): “This seems relevant for the AMPS paradox [48, 49, 50].”
• Habemus superstratum! A constructive proof of the existence of superstrata (2015, background): “See [30–45] for some developments in that area.”
• Jerusalem Lectures on Black Holes and Quantum Information (2014, methodology): “6.1 Entropy bounds and the holographic principle 64 6.2 Statement of the AdS/CFT correspondence 66 6.2.1 Anti de Sitter space 66 6.2.2 Conformal field theory 68 6.2.3 The dictionary 70 6.3 Perturbations of the AdS vacuum 73 6.4 One-sided AdS black holes at fixed energy 75 6.5 One-sided AdS black hol”
• Localized shocks (2014, background): “Arguments have been made that black holes in a typical state do not have an interior geometry [13, 14, 15].”
• Lessons from the information paradox (2020, methodology): “These paradoxes were emphasized in [12] and in [13].”
• A bound on chaos (2015, background): “In general, we assume V (0) and W (0) are simple Hermitian operators, describable as a sum of terms, each a product of only O(1) degrees of freedom.1 We further assume that V,W have zero thermal one point functions.”
• TASI Lectures on the Emergence of Bulk Physics in AdS/CFT (2017, background): “• The Black Hole Interior: The million dollar question in bulk reconstruction in AdS/CFT remains the description of the black hole interior in generic microstates [94, 95, 17].”
• The Ryu–Takayanagi Formula from Quantum Error Correction (2016, background): “This sounds like a mechanism for making a firewall [75–77], but note that this firewall would be at the edge of the entanglement wedge, not at the horizon.”
• Models of AdS2 backreaction and holography (2014, background): “This would seem to conflict with the general lore that holography excludes remnants [22].”
• The Information Paradox for Black Holes. (2015, background): “Despite a large number of papers (see reference [2, 3] for a list), no satisfactory resolution has been found.”
• The Black Hole Information Problem (2016, background): “It can be seen as another argument for the firewall paradox [41, 65].”
• Entanglement wedge reconstruction and the information paradox (2019, background): “Potentially, this is important for precomputation versions of the firewall paradox [65], where an observer attempts to extract a mode from Hrad, which is expected to take exponential time [17], before jumping into the black hole.”
• Remarks on the necessity and implications of state-dependence in the black hole interior (2015, methodology): “We now set out various paradoxes, similar to the ones outlined by [2, 4, 3] which show that the relational observable defined above, cannot be realized by a linear operator.”
• Black holes and the butterfly effect (2013, background): “A stronger argument for firewalls in the state W |Ψ〉 can be made [60].”
• Chaos in quantum channels (2015, background): “This possibly has a strong bearing on the paradoxes of [22, 24] as discussed in [48].”