Black holes: complementarity or firewalls?

By Ahmed Almheiri, D. Marolf, J. Polchinski, J. Sully. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2012

1,714 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We argue that the following three statements cannot all be true: (i) Hawking radiation is in a pure state, (ii) the information carried by the radiation is emitted from the region near the horizon, with low energy effective field theory valid beyond some microscopic distance from the horizon, and (iii) the infalling observer encounters nothing unusual at the horizon. Perhaps the most conservative resolution is that the infalling observer burns up at the horizon. Alternatives would seem to require novel dynamics that nevertheless cause notable violations of semiclassical physics at macroscopic distances from the horizon.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/238fa56c8d6f06b2d87fa3cff9e2faa85a661e42

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

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

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

Citations in the corpus

• Transcending the ensemble: baby universes, spacetime wormholes, and the order and disorder of black hole information (2020, background): “The plethora of proposals for new physics that might be associated with obtaining this Page curve (including [3, 7–39]) were thus all properly viewed as speculative and contained at least some optimistic extrapolation or ad hoc ingredient.”
• Born–Infeld inspired modifications of gravity (2017, background): “On the other hand, the very connection between Hawking’s radiation [199] and standard thermodynamic systems still calls for an understanding in terms of hypothetical black hole microscopic degrees of freedom, and the controversy about the potential existence of firewalls at the event horizon still g”
• The AdS/CFT correspondence (2014, background): “However, when the earnest effort was made at actually seeing precisely how the information is recovered, the situation turned out to be far more intricate and mystifying: Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski, and Sully (AMPS) [153] realized that the following three innocuoussounding assumptions are mutually”
• Information radiation in BCFT models of black holes (2019, background): “A further mystery appeared in the work [7–11], in which the authors argued that assuming a unitary picture of black hole evaporation leads to the conclusion that there cannot be a smooth region of spacetime behind the horizon of an evaporating black hole past the Page time.”
• Hawking radiation, the Stefan–Boltzmann law, and unitarization (2015, background): “This is exactly what is proposed in the simplest “nonviolent” scenarios of [15,22–29] – in contrast to the firewall picture advocated by [6].”
• Chaos in quantum channels (2015, background): “This possibly has a strong bearing on the paradoxes of [22, 24] as discussed in [48].”
• 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.”
• Second law of quantum complexity (2017, background): “This occurs at tmax 1⁄4 eS at which time the horizon becomes opaque by developing a firewall [5,6].”
• Entanglement entropy and nonabelian gauge symmetry (2014, background): “gravitating systems is emphasized by the recent firewall paradox [17], in which the famous information loss paradox was sharpened and reformulated in terms of entanglement entropy of localized subsystems.”
• Nonviolent nonlocality (2012, background): “In particular, [9,10] suggested giving up postulate II of [11], which states that evolution outside the horizon is that of LQFT, providing a possible way to evade the problem of singular behavior at the horizon, that was later elaborated in [5].”
• An apologia for firewalls (2013, methodology): “In recent work [1], inspired by the unitary evaporation models of Mathur [4] and Giddings [5, 6] and the quantum information perspective of Hayden and Preskill [7], we have attempted to sharpen this issue.”
• Remarks on the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model (2016, background): “The enhanced nonconformal contribution agrees with the four point function one expects in a theory of dilaton gravity [28, 26].”
• The entropy of bulk quantum fields and the entanglement wedge of an evaporating black hole (2019, background): “This observation will surely fan the flames of black hole information debates and on the possible role of firewalls [57–59] in particular.”
• Stringy effects in scrambling (2014, methodology): “The firewall proposal [20–22] has re-emphasized the importance of these effects, as transplanckian physics provides an obstruction [23] to building the interior using the pullback-pushforward technique [24–26].”
• Comments on black holes I: the possibility of complementarity (2012, methodology): “For instance, in figure1 of [32], one can ask if the infalling detector gets burnt during the part of its trajectory where it crosses the shaded region representing the outgoing”