Entangled pairs in evaporating black holes without event horizons

We argue that the semiclassical analysis of the black hole information paradox is incomplete and has to be completed by an explicit entanglement of matter and quantum gravity degrees of freedom. We study in detail the evaporation process from beginning to end in the light of our extension and show that a pure initial state remains pure over the full evaporation process, including the final state which remains after the black hole has completely evaporated. By the same token w...

The pair-production process for a black hole (BH) is discussed within the framework of a recently proposed semiclassical model of BH evaporation. Our emphasis is on how the requirements of unitary evolution and strong subadditivity act to constrain the state of the produced pairs and their entanglement with the already emitted BH radiation. We find that the state of the produced pairs is indeed strongly constrained but that the semiclassical model is consistent with all requi...

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...

The black-hole information paradox has fueled a fascinating effort to reconcile the predictions of general relativity and those of quantum mechanics. Gravitational considerations teach us that black holes must trap everything that falls into them. Quantum mechanically the mass of a black hole leaks away as featureless (Hawking) radiation. However, if Hawking's analysis turned out to be accurate then the information would be irretrievably lost and a fundamental axiom of quantu...

At the end of Hawking evaporation, the horizon of a black hole enters a physical region where quantum gravity cannot be neglected. The physics of this region has not been much explored. We characterise its physics and introduce a technique to study it.

It is usually stated that the information storing region associated with the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy is enclosed by a sphere of diameter equal twice the Schwarzschild radius. We point out that this cannot apply to a quantum black hole. The deviation is particularly revealed when the latter is maximally correlated with its Hawking radiation. Specifically, we demonstrate that the size of the entropy sphere associated with the underlying microstructure has to be necessarily b...

A field in the vacuum state, which is in principle separable, can evolve to an entangled state in a dynamical gravitational collapse. We will study, quantify, and discuss the origin of this entanglement, showing that it could even reach the maximal entanglement limit for low frequencies or very small black holes, with consequences in micro-black hole formation and the final stages of evaporating black holes. This entanglement provides quantum information resources between the...

The black-hole information paradox has fueled a fascinating effort to reconcile the predictions of general relativity and those of quantum mechanics. Gravitational considerations teach us that black holes must trap everything that falls into them. Quantum mechanically the mass of a black hole leaks away as featureless (Hawking) radiation, but if the black hole vanishes, where is the information about the matter that made it? We treat the states of the in-fallen matter quantum...

Hawking radiation effects on an entangled pair near the event horizon of a Schwarzschild black hole are investigated. The Hawking radiation was found to degrade both the quantum coherence of the entangled state and the mutual correlations of the entangled pair. When the black hole evaporated completely, the measure of entanglement vanished, but the classical correlation between the entangled pair still remained.

Hawking's argument for information loss in black hole evaporation rests on the assumption of independent Hilbert spaces for the interior and exterior of a black hole. We argue that such independence cannot be established without incorporating strong gravitational effects that undermine locality and invalidate the use of quantum field theory in a semiclassical background geometry. These considerations should also play a role in a deeper understanding of horizon complementarity...