Black hole information recovery from gravitational waves

TL;DR

This paper explores how gravitational waves emitted by black holes can contain recoverable classical and quantum information about the black hole's history, proposing methods to retrieve this information.

Contribution

It introduces an approach to extract classical information from gravitational waves, highlighting their potential to reveal details of black hole formation and evolution.

Findings

Gravitational waves can encode significant information about black hole infall events.

A method using the Zerilli equation can retrieve classical data like mass and infall time.

Searching gravitational waves may be more effective than analyzing Hawking radiation for information retrieval.

Abstract

We study the classical and quantum black hole information in gravitational waves from a black hole's history. We review the necessary concepts regarding quantum information in many-body systems to motivate information retrieval and content in gravitational waves. We then show the first step in an optimal information retrieval strategy is to search for information in gravitational waves, compared to searching for correlations in Hawking radiation. We argue a large portion of the information of the initial collapsing state may be in the gravitational waves. Using the Zerilli equation for particles falling radially into Schwarzschild black holes, we then describe a method to retrieve full classical information about infalling sources, including masses, infall times and angles.