Firewall (physics)
A black hole firewall is a hypothetical phenomenon where an observer that falls into an old black hole encounters high-energy quanta at (or near) the event horizon. The "firewall" phenomenon was proposed in 2012 by Ahmed Almheiri, Donald Marolf, Joseph Polchinski, and James Sully[1] as a possible solution to an apparent inconsistency in black hole complementarity. The proposal is sometimes referred to as the AMPS firewall,[2] an acronym for the names of the authors of the 2012 paper. The use of a firewall to resolve this inconsistency remains controversial as of 2013, with high-energy physicists divided as to the solution to the paradox.[3]
The motivating paradox
A single emission of Hawking radiation involves two mutually entangled particles. The outgoing particle escapes and is emitted as a quantum of Hawking radiation; the infalling particle is swallowed by the black hole. According to widely accepted research by Leonard Susskind and others, the outgoing particle must be entangled with all the Hawking radiation the black hole has previously emitted. This creates a paradox: a principle called "monogamy of entanglement" requires that, like any quantum system, the outgoing particle cannot be fully entangled with two independent systems at the same time; yet here the outgoing particle appears to be entangled with both the infalling particle and, independently, with past Hawking radiation.[3]
In order to resolve the paradox, physicists may eventually be forced to give up one of three time-tested theories: Einstein's equivalence principle, unitarity, or existing quantum field theory.[4]
The "firewall" resolution to the paradox
Some scientists suggest that the entanglement must somehow get immediately broken between the infalling particle and the outgoing particle. Breaking this entanglement would release inconceivable amounts of energy, thus creating a searing "black hole firewall" at the black hole event horizon. This resolution requires a violation of Einstein's equivalence principle, which states that free-falling is indistinguishable from floating in empty space. This violation has been characterized as "outrageous"; one theorist has complained that "a firewall simply can't appear in empty space, any more than a brick wall can suddenly appear in an empty field and smack you in the face."[3]
Non-firewall resolutions to the paradox
Some scientists suggest that there is in fact no entanglement between the emitted particle and previous Hawking radiation. This resolution would require black hole information loss, an extremely controversial violation of unitarity.[3]
Others, such as Steve Giddings, suggest modifying quantum field theory so that entanglement would be gradually lost as the outgoing and infalling particles separate, resulting in a more gradual release of energy inside the black hole, and consequently no firewall.[3]
Juan Maldacena and Leonard Susskind have suggested that the outgoing and infalling particles are somehow connected by wormholes, and therefore are not independent systems; however, as of 2013, this hypothesis is still a "work in progress".[5][6]
The fuzzball picture resolves the dilemma by replacing the 'no-hair' vacuum with a stringy quantum state, thus explicitly coupling any outgoing Hawking radiation with the formation history of the black hole.[7][8]
Stephen Hawking received widespread mainstream media coverage in January 2014 with an informal proposal[9] to replace the event horizon of a black hole with an "apparent horizon" where infalling matter is suspended and then released; however, some scientists have expressed confusion about what precisely is being proposed and how the proposal would solve the paradox.[10]
Characteristics
The black hole firewall would exist at the black hole's event horizon, and would be invisible to observers outside the event horizon. Matter passing through the event horizon into the black hole would immediately be "burned to a crisp" by an arbitrarily hot "seething maelstrom of particles" at the firewall.[3]
See also
References
- ^ Almheiri, Ahmed (11 February 2013). "Black holes: complementarity or firewalls?". Journal of High Energy Physics. 2013 (2). arXiv:1207.3123. doi:10.1007/JHEP02(2013)062.
{{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter|coauthors=ignored (|author=suggested) (help) - ^ Borun D. Chowdhury and Andrea Puhm, "Decoherence and the fate of an infalling wave packet: Is Alice burning or fuzzing?", Phys. Rev. D 88, 063509 (2013)
- ^ a b c d e f Astrophysics: Fire in the hole! http://www.nature.com/news/astrophysics-fire-in-the-hole-1.12726
- ^ Ouellette, Jennifer (21 December 2012). "Black Hole Firewalls Confound Theoretical Physicists". Scientific American. Retrieved 29 October 2013.
- ^ Overbye, Dennis (12 August 2013). "A Black Hole Mystery Wrapped in a Firewall Paradox". New York Times. Retrieved 29 October 2013.
- ^ "The Firewall Paradox". New York Times. 12 August 2013. Retrieved 29 October 2013.
- ^ S. Mathur (2009). "The information paradox: A pedagogical introduction," Class. Quantum Grav., Vol. 26 No. 22 (2009)
- ^ Steven G. Avery, Borun D. Chowdhury, Andrea Puhm, "Unitarity and fuzzball complementarity: 'Alice fuzzes but may not even know it!'", JHEP 09 (2013) 012
- ^ Hawking, Stephen (22 Jan 2014). "Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes". arXiv. Retrieved 15 March 2014.
- ^ "Why some physicists aren't buying Hawking's new black hole theory". Christian Science Monitor. 29 January 2014. Retrieved 15 March 2014.
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