Black Hole Complementarity: The Case of the Infalling Observer

The four postulates of black hole complementarity are:

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 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).

We take as implicit in postulate 2 that the semi-classical field equations are those of a low energy effective field theory with local Lorentz invariance. These postulates do not refer to the experience of an infalling observer, but states a ‘certainty,’ which for uniformity we label as a further postulate:

Postulate 4: A freely falling observer experiences nothing out of the ordinary when crossing the horizon.

To be more specific, we will assume that postulate 4 means both that any low-energy dynamics this observer can probe near his worldline is well-described by familiar Lorentz-invariant effective field theory and also that the probability for an infalling observer to encounter a quantum with energy E ≫ 1/r_s (measured in the infalling frame) is suppressed by an exponentially decreasing adiabatic factor as predicted by quantum field theory in curved spacetime. We will argue that postulates 1, 2, and 4 are not consistent with one another for a sufficiently old black hole.

Consider a black hole that forms from collapse of some pure state and subsequently decays. Dividing the Hawking radiation into an early part and a late part, postulate 1 implies that the state of the Hawking radiation is pure,

|Ψ⟩= ∑_i |ψ_i⟩E ⊗|i⟩_L —– (1)

Here we have taken an arbitrary complete basis |i⟩_L for the late radiation. We use postulates 1, 2, and 3 to make the division after the Page time when the black hole has emitted half of its initial Bekenstein-Hawking entropy; we will refer to this as an ‘old’ black hole. The number of states in the early subspace will then be much larger than that in the late subspace and, as a result, for typical states |Ψ⟩ the reduced density matrix describing the late-time radiation is close to the identity. We can therefore construct operators acting on the early radiation, whose action on |Ψ⟩ is equal to that of a projection operator onto any given subspace of the late radiation.

To simplify the discussion, we treat gray-body factors by taking the transmission coefficients T to have unit magnitude for a few low partial waves and to vanish for higher partial waves. Since the total radiated energy is finite, this allows us to think of the Hawking radiation as defining a finite-dimensional Hilbert space.

Now, consider an outgoing Hawking mode in the later part of the radiation. We take this mode to be a localized packet with width of order r_s corresponding to a superposition of frequencies O(r⁻¹_s). Note that postulate 2 allows us to assign a unique observer-independent s lowering operator b to this mode. We can project onto eigenspaces of the number operator b^†b. In other words, an observer making measurements on the early radiation can know the number of photons that will be present in a given mode of the late radiation.

Following postulate 2, we can now relate this Hawking mode to one at earlier times, as long as we stay outside the stretched horizon. The earlier mode is blue-shifted, and so may have frequency ω_* much larger than O(r⁻¹_s) though still sub-Planckian.

Next consider an infalling observer and the associated set of infalling modes with lowering operators a. Hawking radiation arises precisely because

b = ∫₀^∞ dω B(ω)a_ω + C(ω)a^†_ω —– (2)

so that the full state cannot be both an a-vacuum (a|Ψ⟩ = 0) and a b^†b eigenstate. Here again we have used our simplified gray-body factors.

The application of postulates 1 and 2 has thus led to the conclusion that the infalling observer will encounter high-energy modes. Note that the infalling observer need not have actually made the measurement on the early radiation: to guarantee the presence of the high energy quanta it is enough that it is possible, just as shining light on a two-slit experiment destroys the fringes even if we do not observe the scattered light. Here we make the implicit assumption that the measurements of the infalling observer can be described in terms of an effective quantum field theory. Instead we could simply suppose that if he chooses to measure b^†b he finds the expected eigenvalue, while if he measures the noncommuting operator a^†a instead he finds the expected vanishing value. But this would be an extreme modification of the quantum mechanics of the observer, and does not seem plausible.

Figure below gives a pictorial summary of our argument, using ingoing Eddington-Finkelstein coordinates. The support of the mode b is shaded. At large distance it is a well-defined Hawking photon, in a predicted eigenstate of b^†b by postulate 1. The observer encounters it when its wavelength is much shorter: the field must be in the ground state a^†_ωa_ω = 0, by postulate 4, and so cannot be in an eigenstate of b^†b. But by postulate 2, the evolution of the mode outside the horizon is essentially free, so this is a contradiction.

Figure: Eddington-Finkelstein coordinates, showing the infalling observer encountering the outgoing Hawking mode (shaded) at a time when its size is ω⁻¹_* ≪ r_s. If the observer’s measurements are given by an eigenstate of a^†a, postulate 1 is violated; if they are given by an eigenstate of b^†b, postulate 4 is violated; if the result depends on when the observer falls in, postulate 2 is violated.

To restate our paradox in brief, the purity of the Hawking radiation implies that the late radiation is fully entangled with the early radiation, and the absence of drama for the infalling observer implies that it is fully entangled with the modes behind the horizon. This is tantamount to cloning. For example, it violates strong subadditivity of the entropy,

S_AB + S_BC ≥ S_B + S_ABC —– (3)

Let A be the early Hawking modes, B be outgoing Hawking mode, and C be its interior partner mode. For an old black hole, the entropy is decreasing and so S_AB < S_A. The absence of infalling drama means that S_BC = 0 and so S_ABC = S_A. Subadditivity then gives S_A ≥ S_B + S_A, which fails substantially since the density matrix for system B by itself is thermal.

Actually, assuming the Page argument, the inequality is violated even more strongly: for an old black hole the entropy decrease is maximal, S_AB = S_A − S_B, so that we get from subadditivity that S_A ≥ 2S_B + S_A.

Note that the measurement of N_b takes place entirely outside the horizon, while the measurement of N_a (real excitations above the infalling vacuum) must involve a region that extends over both sides of the horizon. These are noncommuting measurements, but by measuring N_b the observer can infer something about what would have happened if N_a had been measured instead. For an analogy, consider a set of identically prepared spins. If each is measured along the x-axis and found to be +1/2, we can infer that a measurement along the z-axis would have had equal probability to return +1/2 and −1/2. The multiple spins are needed to reduce statistical variance; similarly in our case the observer would need to measure several modes N_b to have confidence that he was actually entangled with the early radiation. One might ask if there could be a possible loophole in the argument: A physical observer will have a nonzero mass, and so the mass and entropy of the black hole will increase after he falls in. However, we may choose to consider a particular Hawking wavepacket which is already separated from the streched horizon by a finite amount when it is encountered by the infalling observer. Thus by postulate 2 the further evolution of this mode is semiclassical and not affected by the subsequent merging of the observer with the black hole. In making this argument we are also assuming that the dynamics of the stretched horizon is causal.

Thus far the asymptotically flat discussion applies to a black hole that is older than the Page time; we needed this in order to frame a sharp paradox using the entanglement with the Hawking radiation. However, we are discussing what should be intrinsic properties of the black hole, not dependent on its entanglement with some external system. After the black hole scrambling time, almost every small subsystem of the black hole is in an almost maximally mixed state. So if the degrees of freedom sampled by the infalling observer can be considered typical, then they are ‘old’ in an intrinsic sense. Our conclusions should then hold. If the black hole is a fast scrambler the scrambling time is r_s ln(r_s/l_P), after which we have to expect either drama for the infalling observer or novel physics outside the black hole.

We note that the three postulates that are in conflict – purity of the Hawking radiation, absence of infalling drama, and semiclassical behavior outside the horizon — are widely held even by those who do not explicitly label them as ‘black hole complementarity.’ For example, one might imagine that if some tunneling process were to cause a shell of branes to appear at the horizon, an infalling observer would just go ‘splat,’ and of course Postulate 4 would not hold.

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