Quantum computation vs. firewalls
By D. Harlow, Patrick M. Hayden. 2013
326 citations recorded by the source corpus.
A bstractIn this paper we discuss quantum computational restrictions on the types of thought experiments recently used by Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski, and Sully to argue against the smoothness of black hole horizons. We argue that the quantum computations required to do these experiments would take a time which is exponential in the entropy of the black hole under study, and we show that for a wide variety of black holes this prevents the experiments from being done. We interpret our results as motivating a broader type of nonlocality than is usually considered in the context of black hole thought experiments, and claim that once this type of nonlocality is allowed there may be no need for firewalls. Our results do not threaten the unitarity of black hole evaporation or the ability of advanced civilizations to test it.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d7aeca495b00727f7af6d8acf987732b7ae76086
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Citations in the corpus
- Efficient decoding for the Hayden-Preskill protocol (2017, unknown): “On the one hand, Harlow and Hayden argued that it is exponentially hard to process the Hawking radiation of an old (more than half-evaporated) black hole so as to produce the standard EPR state [9].”
- Replica wormholes and the black hole interior (2019, background): “In fact, for evaporating black holes, there is good reason to think that it is exponentially complicated [66, 67].”
- Chaos, complexity, and random matrices (2017, background): “More recently, it was asked whether the AMPS thought experiment can be carried out in a physically reasonable amount of time and resources by considering the computational complexity of decoding the Hawking radiation [53].”
- An apologia for firewalls (2013, methodology): “Since we for the moment neglect evaporation, we may set aside the concerns of section 2 and take the point of view of strong complementarity (see v1 of [38], and [37]), that the external observer can measure |i〉 but not b̃†, and the infalling observer can measure b̃† but not |i〉.”
- Time evolution of entanglement entropy from black hole interiors (2013, background): “9 It has been claimed that it is impossible to construct such a computer [52].”
- Chaos and complexity by design (2016, background): “In the context of holography, computational complexity was “introduced” [70] as a possible resolution to the firewall paradox of [71, 6].”
- The Black Hole Information Problem (2016, background): “Another possibility that I would classify as quantum drama is that one cannot actually perform the AMPS experiment because it takes much too long [52].”
- Complexity and Shock Wave Geometries (2014, background): “Until recently this difference between classical and quantum complexity has not played a large role in formulating physical principles, but this may be changing (see also [7]).”
- Entanglement wedge reconstruction and the information paradox (2019, background): “The publication of [10] provoked a flood of responses, including [12–17].”
- Complexity, action, and black holes (2015, background): “Quantum complexity entered black hole physics to help quantify the difficulty of decoding Hawking radiation [2], but it appears to also shed light on physics behind the horizon.”
- Cool horizons for entangled black holes (2013, background): “These are the operators that Harlow and Hayden [18] identify as computationally difficult to access.”