January 18, 2005
The formation and evaporation of a black hole can be viewed as a scattering process in Quantum Gravity. Semiclassical arguments indicate that the process should be non-unitary, and that all the information of the original quantum state forming the black hole should be lost after the black hole has completely evaporated, except for its mass, charge and angular momentum. This would imply a violation of basic principles of quantum mechanics. We review some proposed resolutions t...
December 14, 2020
We consider the black hole information problem in an explicitly defined spacetime modelling black hole evaporation. Using this context we review basic aspects of the problem, with a particular effort to be unambiguous about subtle topics, for instance precisely what is meant by entropy in various circumstances. We then focus on questions of unitarity, and argue that commonly invoked semiclassical statements of long term, evaporation time, and Page time "unitarity" may all be ...
July 19, 2016
We give general overview of a novel approach, recently developed by us, to address the issue black hole information paradox. This alternative viewpoint is based on theories involving modifications of standard quantum theory, known as "spontaneous dynamical state reduction" or "wave-function collapse models" which were historically developed to overcome the notorious foundational problems of quantum mechanics known as the "measurement problem". We show that these proposals, wh...
January 30, 2023
Black hole (BH) evaporation is caused by creation of entangled particle-antiparticle pairs near the event horizon, with one carrying positive energy to infinity and the other carrying negative energy into the BH. Since under the event horizon, particles always move toward the BH center, they can only be absorbed but not emitted at the center. This breaks absorption-emission symmetry and, as a result, annihilation of the particle at the BH center is described by a non-Hermitia...
December 8, 2013
In this paper, we analyze whether quantum correlations between successive steps of evaporation can open any way to resolve the black hole information paradox. Recently a celebrated result in literature shows that `small' correction to leading order Hawking analysis fails to restore unitarity in black hole evaporation. We study a toy qubit model of evaporation allowing small quantum correlations between successive steps and verify the previous result. Then we generalize the co...
September 13, 2011
Recently, several simple quantum mechanical toy models of black hole evaporation have appeared in the literature attempting to illuminate the black hole information paradox. We present a general class of models that is large enough to describe both unitary and nonunitary evaporation, and study a few specific examples to clarify some potential confusions regarding recent results. We also generalize Mathur's bound on small corrections to black hole dynamics. Conclusions are the...
July 7, 2009
We show that, in order to preserve the equivalence principle until late times in unitarily evaporating black holes, the thermodynamic entropy of a black hole must be primarily entropy of entanglement across the event horizon. For such black holes, we show that the information entering a black hole becomes encoded in correlations within a tripartite quantum state, the quantum analogue of a one-time pad, and is only decoded into the outgoing radiation very late in the evaporati...
September 26, 2010
The discovery that black holes emit thermal type radiation changed radically our perception of their behavior. Until then, their interior was considered as causally disconnected from the rest of the universe, so any kind of information, that went down the black hole, was believed to remain eternally trapped in it. The emission of the aforementioned radiation means that some amount of information eventually returns to the universe outside the black hole. The question then rise...
October 4, 2017
Over the years, the so-called black hole information loss paradox has generated an amazingly diverse set of (often radical) proposals. However, forty years after the introduction of Hawking's radiation, there continues to be a debate regarding whether the effect does, in fact, lead to an actual problem. In this paper we try to clarify some aspect of the discussion by describing two possible perspectives regarding the landscape of the information loss issue. Moreover, we advan...
July 27, 1997
The conservative model of a black hole is advanced. The model incorporates conservation laws such as those of baryon and lepton numbers, which lifts the information loss paradox. A scenario of black hole evaporation is considered. Keywords: entropy, emission, radiation, universe, chemical potential