PIRSA:12120029

Unitarity, black hole microstates and how Alices fuzzes but may not even know it

Puhm, A. (2012). Unitarity, black hole microstates and how Alices fuzzes but may not even know it. Perimeter Institute. https://pirsa.org/12120029

Puhm, Andrea. Unitarity, black hole microstates and how Alices fuzzes but may not even know it. Perimeter Institute, Dec. 06, 2012, https://pirsa.org/12120029 

          @misc{ pirsa_PIRSA:12120029,
            doi = {10.48660/12120029},
            url = {https://pirsa.org/12120029},
            author = {Puhm, Andrea},
            keywords = {Quantum Fields and Strings},
            language = {en},
            title = {Unitarity, black hole microstates and how Alices fuzzes but may not even know it},
            publisher = {Perimeter Institute},
            year = {2012},
            month = {dec},
            note = {PIRSA:12120029 see, \url{https://pirsa.org}}
          }

Andrea Puhm Ecole Polytechnique - CPHT

DOI 10.48660/12120029
Collection
Talk Type Scientific Series
Subject

Abstract

The information paradox and the infall problem have been long-standing puzzles in the understanding of black holes. The idea of free infall is in considerable tension with unitarity of the evaporation process and recent developements have made this tension sharp. In the first part of my talk I will address the information question and argue that unitarty requires every quantum of radiation leaving the black hole to carry information about the initial state. Unitary evaporation is thus inconsistent with an information-free horizon at every step of the evaporation process and this extends the recent firewall result. This immediately raises the question of What is the required horizon-scale structure? I will show an explicit construction of near-extremal black hole microstates which put flesh and branes on the fuzzball proposal and may realize firewalls in string theory. In the second part I will address the question of What happens to an observer falling into a fuzzball? I will argue that the answer is dependent on the energy scale of the infalling observer.