The evaporation of black holes into apparently thermal radiation poses a serious conundrum for theoretical physics: at face value, it appears that in the presence of a black hole quantum evolution is non-unitary and destroys information. This information loss paradox has its seed in the presence of a horizon causally separating the interior and asymptotic regions in a black hole spacetime. A quantitative resolution of the paradox could take several forms: (a) a precise argument that the underlying quantum theory is unitary, and that information loss must be an artifact of approximations in the derivation of black hole evaporation, (b) an explicit construction showing how information can be recovered by the asymptotic observer, (c) a demonstration that the causal disconnection of the black hole interior from infinity is an artifact of the semiclassical approximation. This review summarizes progress on all these fronts.
We consider the issue of information recovery for an object carrying energy and entropy into a black hole using the generalized entropy formalism, in the context of JT gravity where the backreaction problem can be solved exactly. We verify the main aspects of the Hayden-Preskill scenario but with some refinements. We show that the information is encoded in the Hawking radiation in a redundant way, as expected for a quantum error correcting code. We show how quantum extremal surfaces associated to information recovery have the form of a python's lunch and thereby show that the complexity of dec…
We show that the apparent horizon and the region near $r=0$ of an evaporating charged, rotating black hole are timelike. It then follows that for black holes in nature, which invariably have some rotation, have a channel, via which classical or quantum information can escape to the outside, while the black hole shrinks in size. We discuss implications for the information loss problem.
In classical gravity, nothing can escape from a black hole, not even light. In particular, this happens for stationary black holes because their horizons are null. We show, on the other hand, that the apparent horizon and the region near r = 0 of an evaporating charged, rotating black hole are both timelike. This implies that there exists a channel, via which classical or quantum information can escape to the outside, as the black hole evaporates. Since astrophysical black holes have at least some rotation, our results apply to all black holes in nature. We discuss the implications of our resu…
Recent work has established a route towards the semiclassical validity of the Page curve, and so provided evidence that information escapes an evaporating black hole. However, a protocol to explicitly recover and make practical use of that information in the classical limit has not yet been given. In this paper, we describe such a protocol, showing that an observer may reconstruct the phase space of the black hole interior by measuring the Uhlmann phase of the Hawking radiation. The process of black hole formation and evaporation provides an invertible map between this phase space and the spac…
We argue that if black hole entropy arises from a finite number of underlying quantum states, then any particular such state can be identified from infinity. The finite density of states implies a discrete energy spectrum, and, in general, such spectra are non-degenerate except as determined by symmetries. Therefore, knowledge of the precise energy, and of other commuting conserved charges, determines the quantum state. In a gravitating theory, all conserved charges including the energy are given by boundary terms that can be measured at infinity. Thus, within any theory of quantum gravity, no…
We study the classical and quantum black hole information in gravitational waves from a black hole's history. We review the necessary concepts regarding quantum information in many-body systems to motivate information retrieval and content in gravitational waves. We then show the first step in an optimal information retrieval strategy is to search for information in gravitational waves, compared to searching for correlations in Hawking radiation. We argue a large portion of the information of the initial collapsing state may be in the gravitational waves. Using the Zerilli equation for particl…
We analyze time evolution of a spherically symmetric collapsing matter from a point of view that black holes evaporate by nature. We first consider a spherical thin shell that falls in the metric of an evaporating Schwarzschild black hole of which the radius $a(t)$ decreases in time. The important point is that the shell can never reach $a(t)$ but it approaches $a(t)-a(t)\frac{d a(t)}{d t}$. This situation holds at any radius because the motion of a shell in a spherically symmetric system is not affected by the outside. In this way, we find that the collapsing matter evaporates without forming…
It is a well-studied phenomenon in AdS$_3$/CFT$_2$ that pure states often appear 'too thermal' in the classical gravity limit, leading to a version of the information puzzle. One example is the case of a heavy scalar primary state, whose associated classical geometry is the BTZ black hole. Another example is provided by a heavy left-moving primary, which displays late time decay in chiral correlators. In this paper we study a special class of pure state geometries which do not display such information loss. They describe heavy CFT states created by a collection of chiral operators at various p…
We study the smoothness of the black hole horizon in the Hayden-Preskill thought experiment by using two particular toy models based on variants of Haar random unitary. The first toy model corresponds to the case where the coarse-grained entropy of a black hole is larger than its entanglement entropy. We find that, while the outgoing mode and the remaining black hole are entangled, the Hayden-Preskill recovery cannot be performed. The second toy model corresponds to the case where the system consists of low energy soft modes and high energy heavy modes. We find that the Hayden-Preskill recover…
In curved space time inside the shell of TeV black holes, many gluons and quarks produce due to Unruh effect, interact with each other and create Higgs boson. Studying the Unruh effect, we show that the inside state of the black hole for gluons and quarks can be represented by a maximally entangled two mode squeezed state of inside and matter Hilbert spaces of black hole. Comparing the Higgs boson production outside and inside the shell, we observe that at lower mass, MBH<4 TeV, and at higher mass, MBH>9 TeV, the Higgs boson will not be produced outside the shell of black hole. However this pa…
We study the universal behavior of quantum information-theoretic quantities in thermalized isolated quantum many-body systems and evaporating black holes. In particular, we study a genuine mixed-state entanglement measure called the logarithmic negativity, other correlation measures including the Renyi negativities and the mutual information, and a signature of multipartite entanglement called the reflected entropy. We also probe the feasibility of recovering quantum information from subsystems of a thermalized quantum many-body system or from the radiation of an evaporating black hole, using …
The issue of unitary evolution during creation and evaporation of a black hole remains controversial. We~argue that some prominent cures are more troubling than the disease, demonstrate that their central element---forming of the event horizon before the evaporation begins---is not necessarily true, and describe a fully coupled matter-gravity system which is manifestly unitary.
Entanglement islands play a crucial role in our understanding of how Hawking radiation encodes information in a black hole, but their relevance in cosmological spacetimes is less clear. In this paper, we continue our investigation of information recovery in de Sitter space and construct a two-dimensional model of gravity containing a domain wall that interpolates between de Sitter space and Rindler space. The Rindler wedges introduce weakly-gravitating asymptotic regions from which de Sitter space can be probed, yielding an outside perspective of the cosmological horizon. In contrast to earlie…
Algebraic Complexity and Black Hole Complementarity
Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学理论物理研究所）；Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学物理与天文学系）
Recently it was shown in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence that the classical gravity description inevitably involves coarse-graining of some degrees. In this note we clarify the nature of this coarse-graining both in gravity and field theory sides. We show that the information carried by the bulk classical gravity fluctuation is transferred to the coarse-grained nonclassical degrees through tiny interactions, which makes the recovery of information almost impossible. Of course, the total system is evolving unitarily fully preserving its information as dictated by the basic construct o…
Recent works have revealed that quantum extremal islands can contribute to the fine-grained entropy of black hole radiation reproducing the unitary Page curve. In this paper, we use these results to assess if an observer in de Sitter space can decode information hidden behind their cosmological horizon. By computing the fine-grained entropy of the Gibbons-Hawking radiation in a region where gravity is weak we find that this is possible, but the observer's curiosity comes at a price. At the same time the island appears, which happens much earlier than the Page time, a singularity forms which th…
We consider a version of the Hayden-Preskill thought experiment in which the message thrown into the black hole is itself a smaller black hole. We then discuss the implications of the existence of a recovery channel for this black hole message at asymptotic infinity, resulting in a sharpening of the black hole information paradox for observers who never need to approach a horizon. We suggest decoherence mechanisms as a way of resolving this sharpened paradox.
We study the effect of projective measurements on the entanglement structure of quantum black holes. It is shown that the entanglement verification in monitored quantum circuits, recently discussed in condensed matter physics, is equivalent to the information recovery from a black hole with projective measurements. This correspondence provides useful predictions about non-perturbative effects on quantum gravity and some insights on the black hole interior as well as the final state proposal.
The Hayden-Preskill recovery problem has provided useful insights on physics of quantum black holes as well as dynamics in quantum many-body systems from the viewpoint of quantum error-correcting codes. While finding an efficient universal information recovery procedure seems challenging, some interesting classes of dynamical systems may admit efficient recovery algorithms. Here we present simple deterministic recovery algorithms for the Hayden-Preskill problem when its unitary dynamics is given by a Clifford operator. The algorithms utilize generalized Bell measurements and apply feedback ope…
Binary black hole coalescence produces a finite burst of gravitational radiation which propagates towards quiescent infinity. These spacetimes are analytic about infinity and contain a dimensionless coupling constant $M/s$, where $M$ denotes the total mass-energy and $s$ an imaginary distance. This introduces globally convergent Fourier series on a complex radial coordinate, allowing spectral representation of black hole spacetimes in all three dimensions. We illustrate this representation theory on a Fourier-Legendre expansion of Boyer-Lindquist initial data and a scalar wave equation with si…
A paradigm describing black hole evaporation in non-perturbative quantum gravity is developed by combining two sets of detailed results: i) resolution of the Schwarzschild singularity using quantum geometry methods; and ii) time-evolution of black holes in the trapping and dynamical horizon frameworks. Quantum geometry effects introduce a major modification in the traditional space-time diagram of black hole evaporation, providing a possible mechanism for recovery of information that is classically lost in the process of black hole formation. The paradigm is developed directly in the Lorentzia…
We point out that two-dimensional Russo-Susskind-Thorlacius (RST) model for evaporating black holes is locally equivalent - at the full quantum level - to flat-space Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) gravity that was recently shown to be unitary. Globally, the two models differ by a reflective spacetime boundary added in the RST model. Treating the boundary as a local and covariant deformation of quantum JT theory, we develop sensible semiclassical description of evaporating RST black holes. Nevertheless, our semiclassical solutions fail to resolve the information recovery problem, and they do not indica…
We revisit in detail the paradox of black hole information loss due to Hawking radiation as tunneling. We compute the amount of information encoded in correlations among Hawking radiations for a variety of black holes, including the Schwarzchild black hole, the Reissner-Nordström black hole, the Kerr black hole, and the Kerr-Newman black hole. The special case of tunneling through a quantum horizon is also considered. Within a phenomenological treatment based on the accepted emission probability spectrum from a black hole, we find that information is leaked out hidden in the correlations of Ha…
