Information locking in black holes

The black hole information paradox is a very poorly understood problem. It is often believed that Hawking's argument is not precisely formulated, and a more careful accounting of naturally occurring quantum corrections will allow the radiation process to become unitary. We show that such is not the case, by proving that small corrections to the leading order Hawking computation cannot remove the entanglement between the radiation and the hole. We formulate Hawking's argument ...

We give a brief overview of the black hole information problem emphasizing fundamental issues and recent proposals for its resolution. The focus is on broad perspective and providing a guide to current literature rather than presenting full details. We concentrate on resolutions restoring naive unitarity.

The black hole information paradox apparently indicates the need for a fundamentally new ingredient in physics. The leading contender is nonlocality. Possible mechanisms for the nonlocality needed to restore unitarity to black hole evolution are investigated. Suggestions that such dynamics arises from ultra-planckian modes in Hawking's derivation are investigated and found not to be relevant, in a picture using smooth slices spanning the exterior and interior of the horizon. ...

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-Nordstr\"{o}m 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 accep...

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 ...

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...

In both classical and quantum world, information cannot appear or disappear. This fundamental principle, however, is questioned for a black hole, by the acclaimed "information loss paradox". Based on the conservation laws of energy, charge, and angular momentum, we recently show the total information encoded in the correlations among Hawking radiations equals exactly to the same amount previously considered lost, assuming the non-thermal spectrum of Parikh and Wilczek. Thus t...

A simple model of a blackhole evaporation without information loss is given. In this model, the blackhole is \textit{not} in a specific mass eigenstate as it evaporates but rather, is in a superposition of various mass eigenstates and is entangled with the radiation. For astrophysical blackhole, the mass distribution is sharply peak about its average value with a vanishingly small standard deviation, which is consistent with our intuition of a classical object. It is then sho...

In 1974 Steven Hawking showed that black holes emit thermal radiation, which eventually causes them to evaporate. The problem of the fate of information in this process is known as the "black hole information paradox". Two main types of resolution postulate either a fundamental loss of information in Nature -- hence the breakdown of quantum mechanics -- or some sort of new physics, e.g. quantum gravity, which guarantee the global preservation of unitarity. Here we explore the...

The Generalized Uncertainty Principle (GUP), motivated by current alternatives of quantum gravity, produces significant modifications to the Hawking radiation and the final stage of black hole evaporation. We show that incorporation of the GUP into the quantum tunneling process (based on the null-geodesic method) causes correlations between the tunneling probability of different modes in the black hole radiation spectrum. In this manner, the quantum information becomes encryp...