Icezones instead of firewalls: extended entanglement beyond the event horizon and unitary evaporation of a black hole

TL;DR

This paper challenges the firewall paradox by proposing that extended entanglement, facilitated by low-energy interactions called icezones, allows for unitary black hole evaporation without firewalls, modifying the horizon's local physics.

Contribution

It introduces the icezone mechanism, a novel infrared interaction process, to explain how black hole information can be recovered without firewalls, extending entanglement beyond the event horizon.

Findings

Extended entanglement modifies the horizon structure.

Icezone interactions provide small corrections initially, then significant effects at evaporation end.

Explicit spin model calculations support the proposed mechanism.

Abstract

We examine the basic assumptions in the original setup of the firewall paradox. The main claim is that a single mode of the lathe radiation is maximally entangled with the mode inside the horizon and simultaneously with the modes of early Hawking radiation. We argue that this situation never happens during the evolution of a black hole. Quantum mechanics tells us that while the black hole exists, unitary evolution maximally entangles a late mode located just outside the horizon with a combination of early radiation and black hole states, instead of either of them separately. One of the reasons for this is that the black hole radiation is not random and strongly depends on the geometry and charge of the black hole, as detailed numerical calculations of Hawking evaporation clearly show. As a consequence, one can't factor out the state of the black hole. However, this extended entanglement between the black hole and modes of early and late radiation indicates that, as the black hole ages, the local Rindler horizon is modified out to macroscopic distances from the black hole. Fundamentally non-local physics nor firewalls are not necessary to explain this result. We propose an infrared mechanism called {\it icezone} that is mediated by low energy interacting modes and acts near any event horizon to entangle states separated by long distances. These interactions at first provide small corrections to the thermal Hawking radiation. At the end of evaporation however the effect of interactions is as large as the Hawking radiation and information is recovered for an outside observer. We verify this in an explicit construction and calculation of the density matrix of a spin model.