Unitarity of black hole evaporation in final-state projection models
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Lloyd-2014-Unitarity of black h.pdf
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512.23 KB
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410fba5daaf74f78266b507edd666398
Author(s)
Lloyd, Seth
Preskill, John
Date Issued
August 2014
Journal
Journal of High Energy Physics
Publisher
Springer-Verlag
Citation
Lloyd, Seth, and John Preskill. “Unitarity of Black Hole Evaporation in Final-State Projection Models.” J. High Energ. Phys. 2014, no. 8 (August 2014).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Almheiri et al. have emphasized that otherwise reasonable beliefs about black hole evaporation are incompatible with the monogamy of quantum entanglement, a general property of quantum mechanics. We investigate the final-state projection model of black hole evaporation proposed by Horowitz and Maldacena, pointing out that this model admits cloning of quantum states and polygamous entanglement, allowing unitarity of the evaporation process to be reconciled with smoothness of the black hole event horizon. Though the model seems to require carefully tuned dynamics to ensure exact unitarity of the black hole S-matrix, for a generic final-state boundary condition the deviations from unitarity are exponentially small in the black hole entropy; furthermore observers inside black holes need not detect any deviations from standard quantum mechanics. Though measurements performed inside old black holes could potentially produce causality-violating phenomena, the computational complexity of decoding the Hawking radiation may render the causality violation unobservable. Final-state projection models illustrate how inviolable principles of standard quantum mechanics might be circumvented in a theory of quantum gravity.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
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Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep08(2014)126
