Holography Abhors Visible Trapped Surfaces

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that holographic principles imply trapped surfaces in classical gravity must be hidden behind event horizons, supporting cosmic censorship and linking holography with gravitational collapse.

Contribution

It proves that holographic consistency enforces the cosmic censorship conjecture by showing trapped surfaces necessarily lie within event horizons in classical gravity.

Findings

Trapped surfaces imply the existence of an event horizon.

Event horizons must be outside trapped surfaces due to causal wedge inclusion.

Spacetimes with naked trapped surfaces likely lack a holographic dual.

Abstract

We prove that consistency of the holographic dictionary implies a hallmark prediction of the weak cosmic censorship conjecture: that in classical gravity, trapped surfaces lie behind event horizons. In particular, the existence of a trapped surface implies the existence of an event horizon, and that furthermore this event horizon must be outside of the trapped surface. More precisely, we show that the formation of event horizons outside of a strong gravity region is a direct consequence of causal wedge inclusion, which is required by entanglement wedge reconstruction. We make few assumptions beyond the absence of evaporating singularities in strictly classical gravity. We comment on the implication that spacetimes with naked trapped surfaces do not admit a holographic dual, note a possible application to holographic complexity, and speculate on the dual CFT interpretation of a trapped surface.