An introduction to information loss paradox, fuzzballs

and firewalls

Borun D. Chowdhury
Department of Physics,
Arizona State University,
Tempe, Arizona 85287, USA

Abstract: We being with a review of Rindlerization of Minkwoski spacetime. We use

this results to understand the information loss paradox. We then discuss fuzzballs and the
recent firewall debate.

Contents
1 Introduction

2 Rindlerization of Minkowski spacetime

3 Black Hole radiation

3.1 Seeing Hawking radiation as Unruh radiation
3.2 Black holes formed from collapse
3.3 Information loss
3.4 Intuitive explanation for information loss

5
5
7
7
8

4 Unitary evaporation
4.1 Fuzzballs basic ideas
4.2 Firewalls
4.3 Pre Page time firewalls

11
11
14
15

Introduction

The information paradox is a long standing problem. In short black holes of same mass
may be formed by collapse of different initial pure states. These black holes are supposed
to look exactly identical outside the horizon and one may wonder if the information of
the initial state is lost. Before the discovery of black hole radiation, one may have instead
said that the information is hidden behind a horizon. However, Hawking showed that black
holes radiate with a spectrum controlled just by the mass. This means the map from initial
state of matter to the final state of radiation is many to one and thus non-unitary. This is
called the information loss paradox.
The last year has seen a resurgence in the interest in information paradox because of
(what have been called) firewalls!. The idea is that the horizon of a black hole has to be in a
particular state the Unruh vacuum to not be singular. It is this state which allows an in
falling observer to fall through unscathed. However, the radiation comes from the vicinity
of the horizon so cannot carry any information if the state in the vicinity is unique. Thus,
unitarity requires some kind of hair for black holes but general relativity does not allow
the same. For a long time folks, especially in the high energy community, were content
with pushing the problem under the carpet by claiming that physics has to look unitary
only for an observer who stay outside forever Bob. So one can postulate that Bob views
the black hole as having hair, or rather being a membrane a distance of Planck length
outside where one would imagine the horizon to be, which evaporates unitarily. However,
somehow an in falling observer Alice does not smash into the membrane and instead

the membrane dynamics describe her evolution by free infall. This idea is called Black hole
complementarity.
Because of black hole complementarity efforts to resolve the black hole information
paradox by construction of hair in string theory (the so called fuzzball proposal) was seen
either as trivial construction of the membrane of black hole complementarity by some
or as a radical modification of the black hole by others. There was also the lore that
small corrections to Unruh vacuum will restore unitarity. To challenge this lore, Mathur
explicitly demonstrated that small corrections cannot restore unitarity using qubit models
and information theoretic results. This was in 2009 and in 2012 Almheiri et. al. essentially
inverted Mathurs result and put the whole argument in the in falling observer (Alices)
frame and challenged the long standing idea of black hole complementarity. They claimed
that, at least for an old black hole (the meaning will become clearer later), the horizon
has to be a large deviation from the Unruh vacuum and thus an in falling observer cannot
have a drama free infall.
This has shocked many people (excluding the fuzzball community) as the information
paradox was thought by them to be essentially a solved problem with the remaining details
simply waiting to fall into place in due time. In these notes, written for a two hour lecture
at ASU, I will explain the information paradox and the fuzzball proposal and the firewall
phenomenon for non-experts. The group here is a cosmology group so I will end the
introduction by explaining why you should care about the problem.
What we have learnt from all this is that quantum gravity effects, naively thought to
be confined to Planck length (lp ) reach out to the horizon scale which depends on the mass
of the black hole lp (M/mp ). This is unlike anything we have ever seen before and violates
our intuition of how effective theory works. Nevertheless if the UV completion of gravity
is to be consistent with quantum mechanics this is what we get. Now turn the problem
around to cosmology. Much (if not all) of our understanding is based on the idea that
we can trust classical equations of motion right unto the big bang. This is why we have
introduced ideas like inflation etc. If quantum gravity effects kick in much earlier than all
of our understanding will need to be revisited.
The plan is follows. I will explain the information paradox by first explaining how
Minkowski space-time can be Rindlerized. The reason is that near horizon geometry of
black holes are Rindler space times. This will demonstrate the tensor product nature of
fields on minkwoski space-time and how they are entangled. We will then understand
eternal black holes and their radiation by comparison with Rindler-Minkowski case. We
will then see how to tweak our model to understand radiation from a black hole formed
from collapse. Finally we will learn how all this leads to information loss. I will end by
explaining very briefly how the fuzzball program proposes to solve the information paradox
and will then explain the recent firewall idea.

Rindlerization of Minkowski spacetime

Following the work of Unruh it is now well known that an accelerating detector will detect
Minkowski vacuum as a thermal bath [1]. This can be more formally seen from the result

that Minkowski vacuum can be expressed as a thermofield double [2] state of Rindler
modes [3]. Here we briefly review the construction. More details can be found in [4] for
example.
For simplicity we work with massless fields and consider 1+1 dimensional spacetime
as the other transverse directions just go for the ride. For any set of light like coordinates,
left movers and right movers decouple. For this discussion we focus on left movers. The
results for the right movers are identical.
For an observer accelerating with constant acceleration there is a last light ray which
will never catch up to her. This phenomenon divides space-time into four wedges. We show
the four Rindler wedges in figure 1. The wedge I is where the observer always remains.
She can detect signals from wedges IV and I. She can send signals to wedges I and II.
Wedge III is completely out of causal contact.

Figure 1. An accelerating observer is confined to the right wedge and can thus not receive any
signals from the left wedge. Ranges of light like Minkowski and Rindler coordinates are given.

Left moving Minkwoski coordinate is given by

U =tx

(2.1)

and left moving Rindler coordinates covering the right and upper wedges and those covering
left and lower wedges are given by
1
1
uR = (U ) ln(aU ),
uL = (U ) ln(aU )
(2.2)
a
a
respectively. Here a is the acceleration of the detector but more formally may be thought
of as a dimensionful parameter controlling the scaling of coordinates for the above map.
The usual Minkowski modes are given by
k (U ) =

1
eikU
4k

(2.3)

and these constitute a complete basis for k [0, ). It is useful to consider an alternate
set of modes
Z
1
,M =
dk
(k/a)i/a k (U )
(2.4)
2k
0

which constitute a complete basis for (, ). The Rindler modes are given by
1
eiuR (U )
4
1
=
eiuL (U ).
4

,R =
,L

(2.5)
(2.6)

where > 0. These are defined in wedges I, IV and wedges II, III respectively. Evaluating
the integral in (2.4) one can see that the non-conventional Minkowski modes can be written
in terms of Rindler modes 2.6 as
h
i
1
,M =
(i/a) (U )(aU )i/a e/(2a) + (U )(aU )i/a e/(2a)
8 2 a

(i/a) /(2a)

[e
,R + e/(2a) ,L ]
>0
2a/
=
(2.7)
(i/a) /(2a)

[e
,R + e/(2a) ,L ]
<0
2a/

From this one can read of the Bogolubov coefficients relating the creation and annihilation
operators of the Minkowski modes (2.4) and the Rindler modes (2.6). The expressions are
quite simple and are given by
b,R = cosh a + sinh a

(2.8)

b,L = cosh a + sinh a

(2.9)

with > 0 and tanh = e/a where a, a are Minkowski creation annihilation operators
and b, b are the Rindler ones. Then the Minkwoski vacuum can be written in terms of
Rindler modes as
Y tanh b b
1
,R ,L
|0M i = pQ
e
|0R i|0L i.
(2.10)
Z
where Z = T r[e2/a ] where Minkowski vacuum is annihilated by a and Rindler
vacua are annihilated as b,L(R) |0L(R) i = 0 for > 0. The advantage of the non-standard
Minkowski basis (2.4) is now obvious our Bogolubov coefficients are diagonal and we can
consider the problem mode by mode. Thus vacuum for the mode may be written as
1 X
|0M, i =
tanhn |n,R i|n,L i.
Z

(2.11)

The reduced density matrix of any one of the Rindler wedges is purely thermal so an
accelerated detector detects a thermal spectrum even though the full state is Minkowski
vacuum [1, 5, 6]!
Note that if we consider the high temperature limit and restrict to fermionic modes
then the above truncates to
1
|0M, i = (|0,R i|0,L i + |1,R i|1,L i)
2

(2.12)

and we can simplify our analysis by just talking about qubits. Now we can observer some
thing. Minkowski vacuum is an entangled state of left and right Rindler modes. This

entanglement should remind you of the EPR paradox. In particular the state (2.12) looks
like a singlet state. If I observe a particle in the right wedge (i.e. using outdate language,
I collapse the wavefuction, then there is also a particle in the left wedge and the overall
state has changed). This is what an accelerated detector does. We can imagine a simple
detector as a two state system which goes from downstate to upstate when it absorbs a
Rindler particle. The interaction hamiltonian is given by
Hint = bL, |+ih| + h.c.

(2.13)

The action to leading order on the initial state with Minkowski vacuum and an unexcited
detector is given by
|0M, i |i |0M, i |i igtbL, |0M, i |+i.

(2.14)

If an observation of the detector clicking has been made (leaving the philosophy of quantum
mechanics aside, if we project onto a detector state which has clicked) the state of the field
is then
bL, |0M, i.
(2.15)
But it is easy to see that
bL, |0M, i a |0M, i

(2.16)

where we have dropped some order one constants. Thus, the absorption of a Rindler
particle in the left wedge is described by an inertial observer as creation of a particle
localized in the right wedge [5]. This spooky action at a distance is no more spooky than
the EPR spookiness bother Einstein et. al. However, what this shows us is that Minkowski
space-time is inherently built of long distance entanglements.

3
3.1

Black Hole radiation

Seeing Hawking radiation as Unruh radiation

The correct way to see black hole radiation is through Hawkings original paper on the
subject [7]. Here we take a short cut which is nevertheless physically illuminating.
The metric of a Schwarzschild black hole is
dr2
+ r2 d2 .
1 2M/r

ds2 = (1 2M/r)dt2 +

(3.1)

This covers the region of spacetime given by r > 2M and t (, ). However, there is
a way to maximally extend the spacetime. We define the tortoise coordinate
r = r + 2M log |

r
1|
2M

(3.2)

and the so called infalling and outgoing Eddington-Finkelstein coordinates

v = t + r ,

u = t r .

(3.3)

The Schwarzschild metric is then

ds2 = (1

2M
)dudv + r2 (u, v)d2 .
r

(3.4)

Here r is defined implicitly in terms of u, v. These coordinates still exist for the same
patch as before though. However, we can now analytically continue the solution by defining
coordinates
U = eu/4M ,
V = ev/4M .
(3.5)
In terms of these the metric is
ds2 =

32M 3 r/2M
e
dU dV + r2 d2 .
r

(3.6)

This is the maximally extended Schwarzschild coordinate (see figure 2).

Figure 2. Maximally extended spacetime. Compare with figure 1.

Infact, there is an easier way to see that one can get past the horizon at r = 2M .
The singularities of the metric are locations where the components of the metric or the
inverse metric blow up. These are easily seen to be at r = 0 and r = 2M . We now define
 = r 2M and expand the metric around r = 2M to leading order in  to get

2M 2
dt2 +
d + (2M )2 d2
2M

2 2
=
dt + 8M d2 + (2M )2 d2
2M
= (8M )(2 d 2 + d2 ) + (2M )2 d2

ds2 =

where = 1/2 , =

t
4M .

(3.7)

We can then define

T = sinh , R = cosh .

(3.8)

with 0 R < and T < R < T . The metric is then

ds2 = (8M )(dT 2 + dR2 ) + (2M )2 d2 .
Then its easy to see that the metric can be continued past the horizon.

(3.9)

We can now see that the spacetime outside the horizon is given by Rindler spacetime to
a good approximation and the full spacetime near the horizon is like Minkowski spacetime.
The discussions of the previous section immediately show us that vacuum with respect
to the time coordinate T will appear thermal with respect to t. I cannot stress enough
the importance of looking at Hawkings original derivation [7] but qualitatively Hawking
radiation for an eternal black hole can be viewed as discussed. Then an observer staying
outside is like an accelerating observer and she sees thermal radiation in both the ingoing
and outgoing directions.
3.2

Black holes formed from collapse

The above picture was for eternal black holes. We saw in the case of Rindlerization of
Minkowski that both left moving and right moving Rindler modes were thermally populated. Turns out the same is true for ingoing and outgoing Schwarzschild modes (satisfying
u k = ikk and v k = ikk ) when we have vacuum defined for the modes natural to the
fully extended spacetime (satisfying U k = ikk and V k = ikk ) and for eternal black
holes when the computation of the previous section is done in detail [1]. The state of the
eternal black hole analogous to Minkowski state on flat space is called the Hartle Hawking
state.
However, we are interested in black holes formed from collapse. The Carter-Penrose
diagram in this case is shown in figure 3. What we want to do is to look at vacuum of
infalling modes and see how it looks in terms of outgoing modes at late times. This can be
done from scratch as was done in Hawkings original paper [7] (see also my review [8]) or by
putting appropriate boundary conditions on the past horizon of an eternal black hole [1].
In any case, the result is that infalling vacuum appears thermal in terms of outgoing modes.

Figure 3. The Penrose Carter diagram for a black hole formed by collapse.

3.3

Information loss

So we saw that infalling vacuum appears thermal in terms of outgoing modes. What is
the big fuss about this? Left (right) movers of Minkowski vacuum appeared thermally

populated for left(right) Rindler modes. Whats new? The point is that the black hole
geometry itself has a mass. It is formed from the collapse of a start as shown in figure 3.
If we take the initial star in a pure state then what started as purely ingoing vacuum plus
a small blip in that there is a star of mass M in a pure state gets converted to perfectly
thermal radiation by the time the black hole has evaporated (it does evaporate if outgoing
modes are populated).
It is important to note that thermality of the radiation is not the key point of information loss. That is incidental and perfect thermality is anyways not there because
of potential barriers outside the horizon reflecting some of the radiation back in (called
graybody factors). The point of information loss is that there were many possible states
with mass M and the final state is only one. This many to one map violates the laws of
quantum mechanics and specifically does not, even in principle, allow reconstruction of the
original state from the final state.
To emphasize this point:
There are two results in Hawkings black hole evaporation analysis [7] which serve as
evidence for loss of unitarity:
Result 1. A pure initial state evolves to a mixed state,
Result 2. The map from the initial state to the final state is many to one and thus
non-invertible.
Both of these originate from the assumption that the horizon of a black hole is in the
Unruh vacuum, independent of the state of the matter that formed the black hole. Any
proposed resolution of the information paradox must address/fix both these issues.
3.4

Intuitive explanation for information loss

In [9] it was shown that the black hole geometry may be foliated by everywhere space-like
surfaces which have the following niceness properties
N1 The intrinsic curvature is low everywhere compared to Planck scale
N2 The extrinsic curvature is low everywhere compared to Planck scale
N3 The 4-curvature in a small neighborhood is low everywhere compared to Planck
scale
N4 The matter on the slices is good everywhere in the sense that the wavelength
is much large than Planck scale and the energy and momentum densities are low
compare to the Plank scale
N5 The lapse and shift vectors change smoothly

This should ensure that semi-classical physics is valid everywhere on the slice and the
effective field theory may be used on them (see [10] for a recent proposal challenging this
though based on computational complexity. I personally do not think nature cares how
hard a problem is computationally though.).
Such nice-slices can be constructed the following way
Outside the horizon, for r > 4M the slice is given by t = t1
Inside the horizon the slice is given by r = r1 for

M
2

< r1 <

3M
2

A connecter region C smoothly joins these two

where r, t are Schwarzschild coordinates.
Since the black hole we consider is formed by collapse the slice can, after traversing a
long distance on r = r1 inside be smoothly taken to r = 0. The slices are evolved further
by moving to t = t1 + outside and r = r1 inside. To maintain smoothness we can
take 0 limit to avoid getting close to the singularity1
In the limit of 0 we see that there is no change in the intrinsic
q geometry of the
outside and the inside region (with the former having a lapse N = 1 2M
r ) but the
connecter region keeps stretching in the process. The only scale in the problem is M and
the connector region essentially stretches by length M in time M . This stretching
produces particles of wavelength M with occupation number 1 at each step.
The exact nature of this state is a squeezed state as shown in [11]
b

|Unruh Vacuumi = Ce b

|0i|0i .

(3.10)

We have adopted the notation where hatted quantities are for the Hilbert space inside
the black hole and unhatted ones are for the Hilbert space outside. C is a normalization
constant and is an order one number. Qualitatively this is the same as (2.10)but the
difference is that unlike the case of Minkowski and Rindler modes, it does not relate left
(right) moving Minkowski modes to left (right) moving Rindler modes but relates early
time Unruh vacuum on nice slices to later time inside and outside modes. The black hole
1
has temperature T = 8GM
and so the typical quanta is at this energy. For simplicity we
consider only this mode and truncate to the first two terms. We also ignore the coefficients.
Then we have
1
|1 i := |Unruh Vacuumi = (|0i|0i + |1i|1i).
(3.11)
2
We see that this state is like the singlet state we studied in quantum mechanics. This is
also referred to as an EPR pair. The two qubits are entangled and the reduced density
matrix of the hatted and the unhatted systems are
1
= (|
0ih
0| + |1ih1|),
2

1
= (|0ih0| + |1ih1|).
2

(3.12)

We can do this for many steps in the evolution but of course the slice does evolve and at some point
this picture breaks down. However, we will see that by that time it is too late to save unitarity.

So we see that the process of stretching of nice slices produces entangled qubits/ modes.
Infact, since this process happens repeatedly, in a truncated qubit language, Hawkings
result implies that a state of the black hole described by n qubits
X
|BHi =
Cq1 ...qn |
q1 . . . qn i
(3.13)
evolves to
i
h 1
|BHi |BHi (|0i|0i + |1i|1i)
2
h 1
i2

|BHi (|0i|0i
+ |1i|1i)
2
..
.
h 1
im
|BHi (|0i|0i + |1i|1i)
2
..
.

(3.14)

This process terminates after n steps because of energy conservation. Each emission
carries away some energy leading to the black hole eventually evaporating away.2 It is easy
to see that the von Neumann entropy of the radiation outside starts at zero and grows by
log 2 at each step going upto n log 2.

(a)

(b)

Figure 4. (a) Two subsequent nice slices that smoothly intersect initial infalling matter (yellow),
newly created Hawking-pairs (blue and red) at the horizon and early Hawking radiation (orange).
(b) Hawking-pair creation at the horizon (dashed line) on two subsequent nice slices sufficiently far
away from the singularity (zigzag line) in order to avoid large curvatures. On slice S1 the outgoing
member of the pair created at the horizon is labelled B1 and its ingoing partner is labelled C1 .
On slice S2 the pair B1 C1 has moved away from the horizon in opposite directions and a new pair
B2 and C2 is created. When not needed, we omit the subscripts which indicate the slice on
which they were created.

Now we have another way of seeing why Hawking radiation leads to information loss.
For this look at figure 4. Two subsequent nice slices have been shown in Penrose diagrams
For Schwarzschild black holes, each emission carries away energy (GM )1 so the process stops after
2
GM 2 steps. The entropy of the black hole is eGM . So the map to qubit models is GM 2 n.
2

10

and in a different diagram where the stretching is more manifest. The stretching happens
far away (1077 light years away for a solar mass black hole) so the produced pair is not
influenced by the initial state of matter that collapsed to form the black hole. In effect, the
pair production is like Schwinger pair production in a strong electric field. The analog of
the electric field here is gravitation and the strength of this field is controlled by the mass
of the star that collapsed to form the black hole. However, the state of the electric field is
independent of the state of the star and so the produced pair are in a unique state.

4
4.1

Unitary evaporation
Fuzzballs basic ideas

I explained in section 3.3 how to correct Hawkings analysis one not only has to ensure the
radiation is pure in the end but also the initial state to final state map has to be invertible.
However, a lot of literature has just focused on the first requirement. For now we do the
same.
We saw that during Hawkings process the entropy of radiation keeps rising. However,
for a pure state the entropy is zero. The latest time at which the entropy has to start
going down is when half of it has evaporated away. This is called Page time based on
discussions in [12, 13]. Look at figure 4 again. The radiation emitted before Page time
is called A, the outgoing Hawking quanta is called B and its infalling Hawking partner is
called C. The statement of strong subadditivity [14] for the system ABC with independent
subsystems A,B and C is
SAB + SBC SB + SABC .
(4.1)
If the evaporation happens by Hawking-pair production the state at the horizon, BC, is
the Unruh vacuum. In other words B and C are maximally entangled: SBC = 0. With
this, SABC = SA and the above relation becomes
SAB SB + SA .

(4.2)

On the other hand the statement of subadditivity [15] is

SAB SA + SB .

(4.3)

Putting (4.2) and (4.3) together yields

SAB = SA + SB .

(4.4)

The systems A and B are thus not correlated and this implies SAB SA and the entropy
of radiation outside never decreases.
Thus, we see that
|BCi = |Unruh vacuumi SBC = 0

(4.5)

SBC = 0 SAB > SA .

(4.6)

11

This is nothing more than Hawkings result actually. If the horizon is in the Unruh
vacuum the entanglement entropy of the radiation keeps increasing. However, there was
a lore around, possibly based on papers [13, 16] that small corrections would fix this
problem. This was challenged by Mathur and we will now see how.
Let us work in a qubit model for simplicity. Let us take the initial state of the black
hole to be spanned by n-qubits.
X
|BHi =
Cq1 ...qn |
q1 . . . qn i
(4.7)
As before we denote inside qubits with a hat and outside ones without hats. At each step
two extra qubits are added to the system, one inside and one outside. Let us look at the
system after m steps. Then the state is given by
X
|BH + radm i =
Cq1 ...qn+m qm ...q1 |
q1 . . . qn+m i |qm . . . q1 i .
(4.8)
The states at the interface are spanned by the so called Bell states
1
|1 i :=
2
1
|2 i :=
2
1
|3 i :=
2
1
|4 i :=
2

|0i|0i + |1i|1i ,


|0i|0i |1i|1i ,


|0i|1i + |1i|0i ,

(4.9)

|0i|1i |1i|0i ,

and to leading order only the first one is involved. However one imagine correcting the
Hawking process3
|BH + radm i
X

Cq1 ...qn+m qm ...q1

X
+
Cq1 ...qn+m qm ...q1
X
+
Cq1 ...qn+m qm ...q1
X
+
Cq1 ...qn+m qm ...q1

i |qm qm1 . . . q1 i
P1 (|
q1 q2 . . . qn+m i) |n+m+1,m+1
1
P2 (|
q1 q2 . . . qn+m i) |n+m+1,m+1
i |qm qm1 . . . q1 i
2
P3 (|
q1 q2 . . . qn+m i) |n+m+1,m+1
i |qm qm1 . . . q1 i
3
P4 (|
q1 q2 . . . qn+m i) |n+m+1,m+1
i |qm qm1 . . . q1 i
4
(4.10)

where note that Pi act only on the hatted qubits so any quanta which have left the vicinity
of the black hole are not affected at later steps. This is just the statement of locality.
The superscripts in |i i denote the location of the newly created qubit pair for hatted and
unhatted qubits respectively.
3

If such a correction works one still has to explain the mechanism in a UV completed general relativity
setup though but right now we are trying to understand what it takes to restore unitarity.

12

Now there are two results which follow from the above. First is due to Mathur [17]
and Avery [18]. They showed that as long as
hPi Pi i
 1,
hP P1 i

for i = 2, 3, 4 ,

(4.11)

the entanglement entropy of radiation keeps rising and the final state can never be pure.Simply
stated, small corrections to the Hawkings process which respect effective field theory outside the black hole (P s do not act on the unhatted qubits) lead to an ever increasing
von-Neumann entropy of the radiation outside and thus have no hope of restoring unitarity. Since Hawkings process arose because of the state at the horizon being in the Unruh
vacuum, the above result can be restated as
Small corrections to the Unruh vacuum at the horizon maintain an ever increasing entropy of the radiation outside as shown in Figure 5b, thus precluding
purity of the final state and therefore unitarity.

(a)

(b)

Figure 5. Entanglement entropy of radiation from (a) a normal body in a typical state and (b) a
traditional black hole with information-free horizon. In normal bodies in a typical state, the entropy
initially goes up and then goes down while for traditional black holes that evaporate via Hawkingpair creation the entropy monotonically increases. Allowing small correction to the leading order
process (solid line) decreases the slope (dashed line) but the entropy curve keeps rising.

So essentially Mathur and Avery generalized the leading argument (4.15) to be

|BCi = |Unruh vacuumi SBC = 0

(4.12)

SBC = ,   1 SAB > SA .

(4.13)

Mathur used this to argue that there has to be order one correction to the state at the
horizon and this is the very definition of fuzzballs. Let us note here that general relativity
does not allow much hair for a black hole and what the above argument shows is that for
unitarity such hair is required at the horizon. Within string theory Mathur has proposed
the fuzzball conjecture where stringy excitations kick in at the horizon scale and spacetime
is cut off. For reviews see [8, 1922] for example. For more details see in particular my
lecture notes for the Modave school [8].

13

4.2

Firewalls

We saw that to leading order Hawkings result can be stated in the form
|BCi = |Unruh vacuumi SBC = 0

(4.14)

SBC = 0 SAB > SA .

(4.15)

AMPS, arguing for the contrapositive of the above statement, said that if after Page time
the entropy of the radiation has to decrease, the state across the horizon cannot be maximally entangled and therefore cannot be in the Unruh vacuum
SAB < SA SBC 6= 0

(4.16)

SBC 6= 0 |BCi =
6 |Unruh vacuumi.

(4.17)

Now it turns out that there are only two states across the horizon which do not have
a divergent stress tensor. Both of these are entangled across the horizon. The HartleHawking state is for eternal black holes so is not relevant for the immediate discussion.
The above argument shows that after Page time the state across the horizon cannot be in
the Unruh vacuum.
Anything other than the Unruh vacuum is not the vacuum state for the infalling
observer and so her detector will click. Whats more, the region near the horizon is highly
blue shifted so if the state is not the vacuum an infalling observer will burn there.
On the face of it the firewall argument seems to be pretty much the same as the
contrapositive of Mathurs argument. So what is new that they bring to the table?
Well, for that we need to know about an idea called black hole complementarity. Well
they challenged black hole complementarity which, for some reason had been more or
less universally accepted in the high energy community (apart from a handful of groups
including fuzzballers) as a resolution to the information paradox.
Black hole complementarity is a collection of three postulates as put forth in [23] based
on the assumption that black hole evolution is consistent with quantum mechanics:
Postulate 1 : The process of formation and evaporation of a black hole, as viewed by
a distant observer, can be described entirely within the context of standard quantum
theory. In particular, there exists a unitary S-matrix which describes the evolution
from infalling matter to outgoing Hawking-like radiation.
Postulate 2 : Outside the stretched horizon of a massive black hole, physics can be
described to a good approximation by a set of semi-classical field equations.
Postulate 3 : To a distant observer, a black hole appears to be a quantum system
with discrete energy levels. The dimension of the subspace of states describing a
black hole of mass M is the exponential of the Bekenstein entropy S(M).
and add one more hidden assumption:

14

 Postulate 4 : A freely falling observer experiences nothing out of the ordinary when
crossing the horizon4 .
While black hole complementary did not provide any mechanism for all of this happening, it was quite widely accepted as I have mentioned. What AMPS did is argue that
it is possible for an infalling observer to have access to all three systems A, B and C thus
showing black hole complementarity cannot work.
4.3

Pre Page time firewalls

The above argument focussed on the final state of the radiation being pure so found that
the state at the horizon has to deviate from the Unruh vacuum no later than Page time.
However, as I mentioned earlier, the information paradox arises because of a many to one
map. Taking into account invertibility, I was able to show [24] that the state at the horizon
has to an order one deviation from the Unruh vacuum at all times.5
The argument applies for black holes formed in arbitrary ones of the eS states. This
can be done by adiabatically collapsing a box of gas with eS possible configurations [26].
Then in the qubit model we have n qubits worth of information. At each step two extra
qubits are added as discussed in (4.10). It can be shown that unitarity requires two qubits
to be in a state independent of the state of the black hole (thus to be in a fiducial state).
Since we have n-steps to get n qubits of information out the fiducial space has to be mapped
to an inside subspace (and not outside or the horizon sunspace). Thus the horizon cannot
be (close to) the Unruh vacuum which is state independent and thus fiducial.
This is the gist of the argument but for more details please see [24, 26].

References
[1] W. Unruh, Notes on black hole evaporation, Phys.Rev. D14 (1976) 870
[2] Y. TAKAHASHI and H. UMEZAWA, THERMO FIELD DYNAMICS, International Journal
of Modern Physics B 10 (1996), no. 13n14, 17551805,
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/S0217979296000817
[3] W. Israel, Thermo field dynamics of black holes, Phys.Lett. A57 (1976) 107110
[4] R. Parentani, The Energy momentum tensor in Fulling-Rindler vacuum, Class.Quant.Grav.
10 (1993) 14091416, hep-th/9303062
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32713277
[7] S. Hawking, Particle Creation by Black Holes, Commun.Math.Phys. 43 (1975) 199220
4

It is worth noting that the word experiences might leave room for different interpretations. In addition
the observer-centric language can cause confusion, like the Schrodinger cat paradox has already taught us.
Below we review the main points of AMPS argument and in Section ?? we reformulate their argument in
terms of local interactions of wave packets.
5
Other arguments towards pre-Page time (or pure state) firewalls were made later in [25].

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[8] B. D. Chowdhury and A. Virmani, Modave Lectures on Fuzzballs and Emission from the
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