Effective field theory models for nonviolent information transfer from black holes

Abstract

Transfer of quantum information from the interior of a black hole to its atmosphere is described, in models based on effective field theory. This description illustrates that such transfer need not be violent to the semiclassical geometry or to infalling observers, and in particular can avoid producing a singular horizon or "firewall." One can specifically quantify the rate of information transfer, and show that a rate necessary to unitarize black hole evaporation produces a relatively mild modification to the stress tensor near the horizon. In an exterior description of the transfer, the new interactions responsible for it are approximated by "effective sources" acting on fields in the black hole atmosphere.If the necessary interactions couple to general modes in the black hole atmosphere, one also finds a straightforward mechanism for information transfer rates to increase when a black hole is mined, avoiding paradoxical behavior. Correspondence limits are discussed, in the presence of such new interactions, for both small black holes and large ones; the near-horizon description of the latter is approximately that of Rindler space. *

Nonviolent unitarization: basic postulates to soft quantum structure of black holes

“…We next turn to the motivation, meaning, and implications of Postulate IV, Universality. In principle, H I could incorporate couplings to any local operators in the vicinity of the BH, and for example, linear couplings to a scalar field φ(x) have been considered as a toy model in [22]. However, some simple arguments imply powerful constraints on these couplings.…”

“…Section five closes with a brief discussion of such prospects, as well as of problems related both to the connection between unitarization and strength of fluctuations, and to the question of the more fundamental underlying physics. 2 Here we follow and elaborate on an approach developed in [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24].…”

Event Horizon Telescope observations as probes for quantum structure of astrophysical black holes

“…In fact, there is a second argument for such universality [13,17,36], based on gedanken experiments [11] involving black hole mining [40][41][42][43]. Here, a cosmic string, or other apparatus, is introduced into the black hole atmosphere to increase its emission rate.…”

“…In the absence of a complete theory of quantum gravity, which might allow us to derive the matrix elements of H µν , at least approximately, we can investigate the sensitivity of astrophysical observations to this type of strong, soft effective metric fluctuation by considering relatively general perturbations with these characteristic scales. While we specifically focus in this paper on the case R a ∼ L ∼ R S , this obviously could be generalized to describe scenarios with different characteristic scale sizes; one can likewise generalize the couplings (1) to give an effective description of other proposals for black hole quantum interactions [35,36] -albeit ones that may do more damage to black hole thermodynamics. In order to stay close to the thermodynamic description, We will specifically focus on perturbations near the thermal frequency, ω T = 1/(8πM ) for a Schwarzschild black hole (unless explicitly noted otherwise).…”

The Firewall Phenomenon

“…This information transfer is a transfer of the entanglement between the early radiation and black hole interior to entanglement between the early and late radiation. It requires an additional energy flux beyond that of the Hawking radiation [91,92], and modulates the Hawking radiation in a sufficiently fine-grained manner so as to preserve the average properties of the Hawking flux. Leading order calculations in a model in which nonlocal metric perturbations couple to the stress tensor suggest in a twodimensional model this might be possible [93].…”