Unitarity and fuzzball complementarity: “Alice fuzzes but may not even know it!”

• Published in: The journal of high energy physics Vol. 2013; no. 9; pp. 1 - 37
• Main Authors: Avery, Steven G., Chowdhury, Borun D., Puhm, Andrea
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01-09-2013; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Asymptotic properties; Black holes (astronomy); Classical and Quantum Gravitation; Detectors; Elementary Particles; Evaporation; Firewalls; High energy physics; Horizon; Operators; Physics; Physics and Astronomy; Proposals; Quantum Field Theories; Quantum Field Theory; Quantum Physics; Relativity Theory; String Theory; Black Holes in String Theory; AdS-CFT Correspondence; Black Holes
• ISSN: 1029-8479; 1029-8479
• DOI: 10.1007/JHEP09(2013)012

A
bstract
We investigate the recent black hole firewall argument. For a black hole in a typical state we argue that unitarity requires every quantum of radiation leaving the black hole to carry information about the initial state. An information-free horizon is thus inconsistent with unitary at every step of the evaporation process. The required horizon-scale structure is manifest in the fuzzball proposal which provides a mechanism for holding up the structure. In this context we want to address the experience of an infalling observer and discuss the recent
fuzzball complementarity
proposal. Unlike black hole complementarity and observer complementarity which postulate asymptotic observers experience a hot membrane while infalling ones pass freely through the horizon, fuzzball complementarity postulates that fine-grained operators experience the details of the fuzzball microstate and coarse-grained operators experience the black hole. In particular, this implies that an in-falling detector tuned to energy
E
~
T
H
, where
T
H
is the asymptotic Hawking temperature, does not experience free infall while one tuned to
E
≫
T
H
does.