Black Holes and Massive Remnants

TL;DR

This paper explores the idea that black hole remnants could store large amounts of information, potentially resolving the black hole information paradox, but introduces issues with causality and the late stages of evaporation.

Contribution

It proposes a novel scenario where black hole remnants carry significant information, depending on their content, challenging previous assumptions about information escape or loss.

Findings

Remnants could contain large amounts of information.

Such remnants would significantly alter black hole evaporation.

Acausal behavior may arise behind the horizon.

Abstract

This paper revisits the conundrum faced when one attempts to understand the dynamics of black hole formation and evaporation without abandoning unitary evolution. Previous efforts to resolve this puzzle assume that information escapes in corrections to the Hawking process, that an arbitrarily large amount of information is transmitted by a planckian energy or contained in a Planck-sized remnant, or that the information is lost to another universe. Each of these possibilities has serious difficulties. This paper considers another alternative: remnants that carry large amounts of information and whose size and mass depend on their information content. The existence of such objects is suggested by attempts to incorporate a Planck scale cutoff into physics. They would greatly alter the late stages of the evaporation process. The main drawback of this scenario is apparent acausal behavior behind the horizon.