Black Hole Waterfall: a unitary phenomenological model for black hole evaporation with Page curve

TL;DR

This paper introduces a unitary phenomenological model for black hole evaporation that reproduces the Page curve, ensuring information preservation and providing insights into the entanglement dynamics of Hawking radiation.

Contribution

The model uniquely incorporates interior Hawking partner-particles generating additional Hawking pairs, reproduces the Page curve, and maintains unitarity throughout black hole evaporation.

Findings

Produces a Page curve with entropy rising and falling during evaporation

Maintains a pure, unitary evolution of the entire system

Models the final black hole state as vacuum with emitted radiation carrying initial energy

Abstract

We present a unitary phenomenological model for black hole evaporation based on the analogy of the laboratory process of spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC) when the black hole (pump) is allowed to deplete to zero mass. The model incorporates an additional new feature that allows for the interior Hawking partner-particles (idlers) behind the horizon to further generate new Hawking particle pairs of lower energy, one of which remains behind the horizon, and the other that adds to the externally emitted Hawking radiation (signals) outside the horizon. This model produces a Page curve for the evolution of the reduced density matrices for the evaporating black hole internal degrees of freedom entangled with the generated Hawking radiation pairs entangled across the horizon. The Page curve yields an entropy that rises at early times during the evaporation process as Hawking pairs are generated, reaches a peak midway through the evolution, and then decays to zero upon complete evaporation of the black hole. The entire system remains in a pure state at all times undergoing unitary (squeezed state) evolution, with the initial state of the black hole modeled as a bosonic Fock state of large, but finite number $n_{p0}$ of particles. For the final state of the system, the black hole reaches the vacuum state of zero mass, while the external Hawking radiation carries away the total energy of the initial black hole. Inside the horizon there remains $n_{p0}$ Hawking partner-particles of vanishingly small total energy, reminiscent of the "soft-hair" (zero energy) qubit model of Hotta, Nambu and Yamaguchi, but now from a Hamiltonian for squeezed state generation perspective. The model presented here can be readily extended to encompass arbitrary initial pure states for the black hole, and in falling matter.