We consider large gauge transformations of gravity and electromagnetism in D=4 asymptotically flat spacetime. Already at the classical level, we identify a canonical transformation that decouples the soft variables from the hard dynamics. We find that only the soft dynamics is constrained by BMS or large U(1) charge conservation. Physically this corresponds to the fact that sufficiently long-wavelength photons or gravitons that are added to the in-state will simply pass through the interaction region; they scatter trivially in their own sector. This implies in particular that the large gauge symmetries bear no relevance to the black hole information paradox. We also present the quantum version of soft decoupling. As a consistency check, we show that the apparent mixing of soft and hard modes in the original variables arises entirely from the long range field of the hard charges, which is fixed by gauge invariance and so contains no additional information.
We revisit the Parikh-Wilczek's tunneling model of Hawking radiation in the Schwarzschild black hole with soft hair. Unlike the no-hair black hole, tunneling through the degenerate event horizon generated by supertranslation hair picks up an angular dependence, which suggests a hairy modification to the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. At last, we discuss several implications and possible observable of soft hair.
Treating Maxwell soft hair as a transition function that relates U(1) gauge fields living in the asymptotic region and near-horizon region, the U(1) gauge parameter $ϕ$ naturally becomes a good label of those Maxwell soft hair degrees of freedom. This interpretation also builds the connection between Maxwell soft hair and U(1) edge modes living in the intermediate region, which admits a well-defined effective action description. We study the statistical properties by Euclidean path integral, which concludes that the soft hair density of state increases with black hole temperature. Hawking radi…
The fluid/gravity correspondence establishes how gravitational dynamics, as dictated by Einstein's field equations, are related to the fluid dynamics, governed by the relativistic Navier-Stokes equations. In this work the correspondence is extended, where the duality between incompressible fluids and gravitational backgrounds with soft hair excitations is implemented. This construction is set through appropriate boundary conditions to the gravitational background, leading to a correspondence between generalized incompressible Navier-Stokes equations and soft hairy horizons.
The membrane paradigm posits that black hole microstates are dynamical degrees of freedom associated with a physical membrane vanishingly close to the black hole's event horizon. The soft hair paradigm postulates that black holes can be equipped with zero-energy charges associated with residual diffeomorphisms that label near horizon degrees of freedom. In this essay we argue that the latter paradigm implies the former. More specifically, we exploit suitable near horizon boundary conditions that lead to an algebra of `soft hair charges' containing infinite copies of the Heisenberg algebra, ass…
We calculate log corrections to the entropy of three-dimensional black holes with "soft hairy" boundary conditions. Their thermodynamics possesses some special features that preclude a naive direct evaluation of these corrections, so we follow two different approaches. The first one exploits that the BTZ black hole belongs to the spectrum of Brown-Henneaux as well as soft hairy boundary conditions, so that the respective log corrections are related through a suitable change of the thermodynamic ensemble. In the second approach the analogue of modular invariance is considered for dual theories …
We develop a unified framework for the construction of soft dressings at boundaries of spacetime, such as the null infinity of Minkowski spacetime and the horizon of a Schwarzschild black hole. The construction is based on an old proposal of Mandelstam for quantizing QED and considers matter fields dressed by Wilson lines. Along time-like paths, the Wilson lines puncturing the boundary are the analogs of flat space Faddeev-Kulish dressings. We focus on the Schwarzschild black hole where our framework provides a quantum-field-theoretical perspective of the Hawking-Perry-Strominger viewpoint tha…
Large gauge transformations (LGT) in asymptotically flat space are generated by charges defined at asymptotic infinity. No method for unambiguously localising these charges into the interior of spacetime has previously been established. We determine what this method must be, and use it to find localised expressions for the LGT charges. Applying the same principle to the case of a charged black hole spacetime leads to angle-dependent generalisations of the Smarr formula and the first law of black hole mechanics, both of which have important thermodynamical implications. In particular, the prese…
We explore the spacetime structure near non-extremal horizons in any spacetime dimension greater than two and discover a wealth of novel results: 1. Different boundary conditions are specified by a functional of the dynamical variables, describing inequivalent interactions at the horizon with a thermal bath. 2. The near horizon algebra of a set of boundary conditions, labeled by a parameter $s$, is given by the semi-direct sum of diffeomorphisms at the horizon with "spin-$s$ supertranslations". For $s=1$ we obtain the first explicit near horizon realization of the Bondi-Metzner-Sachs algebra. …
We study the near horizon geometry of both static and stationary extremal Oliva Tempo Troncoso (OTT) black holes. For each of these cases, a set of consistent asymptotic conditions is introduced. The canonical generator for the static configuration is shown to be regular. For the rotating OTT black hole, the asymptotic symmetry is described by the time reparametrization, the chiral Virasoro and centrally extended $u(1)$ Kac-Moody algebras.
We study entanglement between two modes of a free bosonic and fermionic field as seen by two relatively accelerating observers at the soft-hair horizon of a four-dimensional supertranslated Schwarzschild black hole. First, we associate the shock wave to the near horizon geometry by explicit construction of map between their metric as well as relation between wave form factor and soft hair function. We then compute mutual information and entanglement negativity as a measure of entanglement between these two observers and show that their angular dependence at the soft-hair horizon. We also show …
Three-dimensional Einstein gravity with negative cosmological constant admits stationary black holes that are not necessarily spherically symmetric. We propose boundary conditions for the near horizon region of these black holes that lead to a surprisingly simple near horizon symmetry algebra consisting of two affine u(1) current algebras. The symmetry algebra is essentially equivalent to the Heisenberg algebra. The associated charges give a specific example of "soft hair" on the horizon, as defined by Hawking, Perry and Strominger. We show that soft hair does not contribute to the Bekenstein-…
Light bending by the strong gravity around the black hole will form the so-called black hole shadow, the shape of which can shed light on the structure of the near-horizon geometry to possibly reveal novel physics of strong gravity and black hole. In this work, we adopt both analytical and ray-tracing methods to study the black hole shadow in the presence of the infrared structure of gravity theory, which manifests the asymptotic symmetries of spacetime as the supertranslation soft hairs of the black hole. Though the black hole metrics with and without the soft hair are related by large gauge …
We present a paradox for evaporating black holes, which is common in most schemes trying to avoid the firewall by decoupling early and late radiation. At the late stage of the black hole evaporation, the decoupling between early and late radiation can not be realized because the black hole has a very small coarse-grained entropy, then we are faced with the firewall again. We call the problem hair-loss paradox as a pun on losing black hole soft hair during the black hole evaporation and the situation that the information paradox has put so much pressure on researchers.
It has recently been shown that BMS supertranslation symmetries imply an infinite number of conservation laws for all gravitational theories in asymptotically Minkowskian spacetimes. These laws require black holes to carry a large amount of soft ($i.e.$ zero-energy) supertranslation hair. The presence of a Maxwell field similarly implies soft electric hair. This paper gives an explicit description of soft hair in terms of soft gravitons or photons on the black hole horizon, and shows that complete information about their quantum state is stored on a holographic plate at the future boundary of …
We propose a model with multiple qubits that reproduces the thermal properties of 4-dimensional (4-dim) Schwarzschild black holes (BHs) by simultaneously taking account of the emission of Hawking particles and the zero-energy soft hair evaporation at horizon. The results verify that the entanglement entropy between a qubit and other subsystems, including emitted radiation, is much larger than the BH entropy analogue of the qubit, as opposed to the Page curve prediction. Our result suggests that early Hawking radiation is entangled with soft hair, and that late Hawking radiation can be highly e…
We build on the observation by Hawking, Perry and Strominger that a global black hole space-time supports a large number of soft hair degrees of freedom to shed new light on the firewall argument by Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski, and Sully. We propose that the soft hair Goldstone mode is encoded in a classical transition function that connects the asymptotic and near horizon region. The entropy carried by the soft hair is part of the black hole entropy and encoded in the outside geometry. We argue that the infalling observer automatically measures the classical value of the soft mode before rea…
We construct a new set of boundary conditions for higher spin gravity, inspired by a recent "soft Heisenberg hair"-proposal for General Relativity on three-dimensional Anti-de Sitter. The asymptotic symmetry algebra consists of a set of affine $\hat u(1)$ current algebras. Its associated canonical charges generate higher spin soft hair. We focus first on the spin-3 case and then extend some of our main results to spin-$N$, many of which resemble the spin-2 results: the generators of the asymptotic $W_3$ algebra naturally emerge from composite operators of the $\hat u(1)$ charges through a twis…
Inspired by the recent proposal of soft hair on black holes in Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 231301 (2016), we have shown that an isolated horizon carries soft hairs implanted by electromagnetic fields. The solution space and the asymptotic symmetries of Einstein-Maxwell theory have been worked out explicitly near isolated horizon. The conserved current has been computed and an infinite number of near horizon charges have been introduced from the electromagnetic fields associated to the asymptotic $U(1)$ symmetry near the horizon, which indicates the fact that isolated horizon carries a large amount o…
We provide the first explicit proposal for all microstates of generic black holes in three dimensions (of Banados-Teitelboim-Zanelli-type): black hole microstates, termed "horizon fluffs", are a particular class of near horizon soft hairs which have zero energy as measured by the horizon observer and cannot be distinguished by observers at finite distance from the horizon. These states are arranged in orbits of the two-dimensional conformal algebra associated with the asymptotic black hole geometry. We count these microstates using the Hardy-Ramanujan formula for the number of partitions of a …
General covariance is the cornerstone of Einstein's General Relativity (GR) and implies that any two metrics related by diffeomorphisms are physically equivalent. There are, however, many examples pointing to the fact that this strict statement of general covariance needs refinement. There are a very special (measure-zero) subset of diffeomorphisms, the residual diffeomrphisms, to which one can associate well-defined conserved charges. This would hence render these diffeomorphic geometries physically distinct. We discuss that these symmetries may be appropriately called "symplectic symmetries"…
We study the boundary CFT under supertranslation in terms of the AdS/CFT correspondence. In particular, we probe the soft hair BTZ background by several open string configurations as follows. The Ryu-Takayanaki formula of holographic entanglement remains intact under supertranslation. The U-shape string probe indicates that the flat part of meson potential is altered by the soft charge. The trailing string solution shows that the hair parameter plays the role of external field in the drag force. The study of hanging string in the Brownian motion suggests the transport variables, such as fricti…
A recent, intriguing paper by Hawking, Perry and Strominger suggests that soft photons and gravitons can be regarded as black hole hair and may be relevant to the black hole information paradox. In this note we make use of factorization theorems for infrared divergences of the S-matrix to argue that by appropriately dressing in and out hard states, the soft-quanta-dependent part of the S-matrix becomes essentially trivial. The information paradox can be fully formulated in terms of dressed hard states, which do not depend on soft quanta.
We demonstrate within the quantum field theoretical framework that an asymptotic particle falling into the black hole implants soft graviton hair on the horizon, conforming with the classical proposal of Hawking, Perry and Strominger. A key ingredient to this result is the construction of gravitational Wilson line dressings of an infalling scalar field, carrying a definite horizon supertranslation charge. It is shown that a typical Schwarzschild state is degenerate, and can be labeled by different soft supertranslation hairs parametrized for radial trajectories by the mass and energy of the in…
Einstein observers in flat space-time are inertial observers which use light to synchronize their clocks. For such observers, speed of light is a constant by construction. However, one can use super-translations to change coordinates from Einstein to BMS coordinates. From the point of view of BMS observers, speed of light is not a constant all over the space-time and in all directions. So in general, clocks which are synchronized for Einstein observers are not synchronized for BMS observers, and vice versa. Based on this fact, we propose a local observable for detecting the soft hairs, which i…
Recent studies of asymptotic symmetries suggest, that a Hamiltonian phase space analysis in gravitational theories might be able to account for black hole microstates. In this context we explain, why the use of conventional Bondi fall-off conditions for the gravitational field is too restrictive in the presence of an event horizon. This implies an enhancement of physical degrees of freedom ($\mathcal{A}$-modes). They provide new gravitational hair and are responsible for black hole microstates. Using covariant phase space methods, for the example of a Schwarzschild black hole, we give a propos…
Recently a set of diffeomorphisms were found which act nontrivially on the Kerr horizon and form a left-right pair of Virasoro algebras. Using the boundary formula for the associated central charge and assuming applicability of the Cardy formula to a putative dual CFT, the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy for the Kerr black hole was reproduced. In this paper, the addition of charge to the black hole is shown to require a minimal modification to this construction which then reproduces the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy for the Kerr-Newman black hole.
One interesting proposal to solve the black hole information loss paradox without modifying either general relativity or quantum field theory, is the soft hair, a diffeomorphism charge that records the anisotropic radiation in the asymptotic region. This proposal, however, has been challenged, given that away from the source the soft hair behaves as a coordinate transformation that forms an Abelian group, thus unable to store any information. To maintain the spirit of the soft hair but circumvent these obstacles, we consider Hawking radiation as a probe sensitive to the entire history of the b…
Motivated by the lack of a general parametrization for exotic compact objects, we construct a class of perturbative solutions valid for small (but otherwise generic) multipolar deviations from a Schwarzschild metric in general relativity. We introduce two classes of exotic compact objects, with "soft" and "hard" hair, for which the curvature at the surface is respectively comparable to or much larger than that at the corresponding black-hole horizon. We extend the Hartle-Thorne formalism to relax the assumption of equatorial symmetry and to include deformations induced by multipole moments hig…
In [1] the horizon fluffs proposal is put forward to identify microstates of generic non-extremal three-dimensional Banados-Teitelboim-Zanelli (BTZ) black holes. The proposal is that black hole microstates, which were dubbed as horizon fluffs, are states labelled by the conserved charges associated with non-trivial diffeomorphisms on the near horizon geometry and these states are not in the coadjoint orbits of the asymptotic Virasoro algebra at the Brown-Henneaux central charge, associated with the BTZ black holes. It is also known that AdS3 Einstein gravity has more general black hole solutio…
We present and discuss near horizon boundary conditions for flat space higher-spin gravity in three dimensions. As in related work our boundary conditions ensure regularity of the solutions independently of the charges. The asymptotic symmetry algebra is given by a set of $\hat{\mathfrak{u}}(1)$ current algebras. The associated charges generate higher-spin soft hair. We derive the entropy for solutions that are continuously connected to flat space cosmologies and find the same result as in the spin-2 case: the entropy is linear in the spin-2 zero-mode charges and independent from the spin-3 ch…
We revisit Carlip's approach to entropy counting. This analysis reemerged in a recently obtained Schwarzschild/CFT-correspondence as Sugawara-construction of a 2D stress-tensor. Here, for the example of a Schwarzschild black hole, we show how to single out diffeomorphisms forming in contrast to Carlip's analysis the full 2D local conformal algebra. We provide arguments, why their Hamiltonian generators are expected to be the symmetry generators of a possible conformal field theory describing the part of phase space responsible for black hole microstates. Then, we can infer central charges and …
A set of infinitesimal ${\rm Virasoro_{\,L}}\otimes{\rm Virasoro_{\,R}}$ diffeomorphisms are presented which act non-trivially on the horizon of a generic Kerr black hole with spin J. The covariant phase space formalism provides a formula for the Virasoro charges as surface integrals on the horizon. Integrability and associativity of the charge algebra are shown to require the inclusion of `Wald-Zoupas' counterterms. A counterterm satisfying the known consistency requirement is constructed and yields central charges $c_L=c_R=12J$. Assuming the existence of a quantum Hilbert space on which thes…
Recently it has been speculated that a set of infinitesimal ${\rm Virasoro_{\,L}}\otimes{\rm Virasoro_{\,R}}$ diffeomorphisms exist which act non-trivially on the horizon of some black holes such as kerr and Kerr-Newman black hole \cite{Haco:2018ske,Haco:2019ggi}. Using this symmetry in covariant phase space formalism one can obtains Virasoro charges as surface integrals on the horizon. Kerr-Bolt spacetime is well-known for its asymptotically topology and has been studied widely in recent years. In this work we are interested to find conserved charge associated to the Virosora symmetry of Kerr…
Recent results on the infrared structure of gravity and electromagnetism have suggested that the deep infrared is much richer than previously appreciated. This article presents a generalisation of these findings within the context of abelian and nonabelian soft (i.e. zero-energy) gauge charges. As a warm up, we describe the emergence of an infinity of soft magnetic charges even in the absence of magnetic monopoles. We show that two infinite sets of soft charges arise in the nonabelian theory as well. In light of the concomitant conservation laws associated with the soft charges, we revisit the…
