The flaw in the firewall argument
Samir D. Mathur, David Turton

TL;DR
This paper clarifies black hole complementarity by analyzing the mechanisms ensuring unitarity, showing that high-energy quanta enable a consistent complementary description and addressing recent criticisms.
Contribution
It introduces a detailed mechanism involving energy scales and horizon dynamics that supports black hole complementarity, countering recent arguments against it.
Findings
High-energy Hawking quanta carry information.
The stretched horizon expands to accommodate infalling bits.
Infalling quanta interact mainly within a small distance from the horizon.
Abstract
A lot of confusion surrounds the issue of black hole complementarity, because the question has been considered without discussing the mechanism which guarantees unitarity. Considering such a mechanism leads to the following: (1) The Hawking quanta with energy E of order the black hole temperature T carry information, and so only appropriate processes involving E>>T quanta can have any possible complementary description with an information-free horizon; (2) The stretched horizon describes all possible black hole states with a given mass M, and it must expand out to a distance s_{bubble} before it can accept additional infalling bits; (3) The Hawking radiation has a specific low temperature T, and infalling quanta interact significantly with it only within a distance s_{alpha} of the horizon. One finds s_{alpha} << s_{bubble} for E>>T, and this removes the argument against complementarity…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
