A toy model for decoherence in the black hole information problem

TL;DR

This paper explores how decoherence affects black hole evaporation and information retrieval, suggesting that even minimal decoherence can significantly alter the black hole information paradox timeline.

Contribution

It introduces a toy model demonstrating that decoherence can delay the paradox, providing a new perspective on black hole information retrieval mechanisms.

Findings

Decoherence enables efficient information extraction from evaporating black holes.

The paradox is shifted from the Page time to a decoherence-dependent timescale.

Numerical simulations support the effective rate equation for entanglement dynamics.

Abstract

We investigate a plausible route to resolving the black hole information paradox by examining the effects of decoherence on Hawking radiation. In particular, we show that a finite but non-zero rate of decoherence can lead to efficient extraction of information from the evaporating black hole. This effectively pushes the paradox from becoming manifest at the Page time when the black hole has evaporated to half its size, to a timescale solely determined by the rate of decoherence. If this rate is due to a putative interaction with gravitons, the black hole at this timescale can be expected to be Planck-sized, but notably without an extensive amount of information packed inside. We justify our findings by numerically studying a toy model of stabilizer circuits that can efficiently model black hole evaporation in the presence of decoherence. The latter is found to be well described by an effective rate equation for the entanglement and which corroborates our findings.