nLab black hole firewall problem

Idea

In AMPS 2012, it is proposed that infalling observers encounter a “firewall” at (or just outside) the event horizon of a black hole. This is part of an attempted resolution of the black hole information paradox.

For a rough summary, see Wikipedia for now.

Related entries

• holographic entanglement entropy

References

The suggestion that there is a black hole “firewall” phenomenon originates in

• Ahmed Almheiri, Donald Marolf, Joseph Polchinski, James Sully, Black holes: complementarity or firewalls? (arXiv:1207.3123)

with a folowup in:

• Ahmed Almheiri, Don Marolf, Joseph Polchinski, Douglas Stanford, James Sully?, An Apologia for Firewalls 2013 (arXiv:1304.6483)

A systematic analysis of the (non-)phenomenon using actual computations in AdS-CFT duality is in

• Kyriakos Papadodimas, Suvrat Raju, An Infalling Observer in AdS/CFT (arXiv:1211.6767)

whose authors say in their introduction:

These $[$BH firewall$]$ proposals originate not from direct calculations in quantum gravity, $[$…$]$ While quantum gravity is a mysterious subject, the AdS-CFT correspondence provides us with a setting where we can examine these ideas within a perfectly well defined theory.

A useful comment on that article is in

• Ted Jacobson, Boundary unitarity without firewalls (arXiv:1212.6944)

In the course of this debate, the following article proposed that there is a close relation between wormholes (Einstein-Rosen bridges) and quantum entanglement (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen phenomenon), now known as “ER = EPR”:

• Juan Maldacena, Leonard Susskind, Cool horizons for entangled black holes 2013 (arXiv:1306.0533)

Other contributions to the issue include the following

• Erik Verlinde, Herman Verlinde, Black Hole Information as Topological Qubits 2013 (arXiv:1306.0516)

• Erik Verlinde, Herman Verlinde, Passing through the Firewall 2013 (arXiv:1306.0515)

• Leonard Susskind, Black Hole Complementarity and the Harlow-Hayden Conjecture 2013 (arXiv:1301.4505)

• Daniel Harlow, Patrick Hayden, Quantum Computation vs. Firewalls 2013 (arXiv:1301.4504) – points out the significance of the so-called “overlap criterion,” and suggests a way around the firewall paradox by arguing that the criterion should be relaxed.

• S. H. Shenker, D. Stanford, Black holes and the butterfly effect 2013 (arXiv:1306.0622)

• Don Page, Excluding Black Hole Firewalls with Extreme Cosmic Censorship 2013 (arXiv:1306.0562)

• Raphael Bousso, Complementarity Is Not Enough 2012 (arXiv:1207.5192)

• Tom Banks, Willy Fischler, No Firewalls in Holographic Space-Time or Matrix Theory 2013 (arXiv:1305.3923)

• Mark van Raamsdonk, Building up spacetime with quantum entanglement, Gen. Rel. Grav.42:2323-2329,2010; Int.J.Mod.Phys.D19:2429-2435,2010 (arXiv:1005.3035)

• Samuel L. Braunstein; S. Pirandola, K. Życzkowski, Better Late than Never: Information Retrieval from Black Holes (2013) [arXiv:0907.1190]

• Samir D. Mathur, David Turton, Comments on black holes I: The possibility of complementarity 2012, arXiv:1208.2005

• Samir D. Mathur, The information paradox: A pedagogical introduction 2009, arXiv:0909.1038