Black Hole Remnants and the Information Puzzle

TL;DR

This paper explores the nature of magnetically charged dilatonic black hole remnants, proposing they may store information lost in black hole processes, with finite pair production rates despite infinite degeneracy.

Contribution

It introduces a causality-based argument that these black hole states cannot be described as ordinary particles and estimates their pair production in a weak magnetic field.

Findings

Pair production rate is finite despite infinite degeneracy.

Black hole remnants may encode information lost in scattering.

States lack a low-energy effective field theory description.

Abstract

Magnetically charged dilatonic black holes have a perturbatively infinite ground state degeneracy associated with an infinite volume throat region of the geometry. A simple argument based on causality is given that these states do not have a description as ordinary massive particles in a low-energy effective field theory. Pair production of magnetic black holes in a weak magnetic field is estimated in a weakly-coupled semiclassical expansion about an instanton and found to be finite, despite the infinite degeneracy of states. This suggests that these states may store the information apparently lost in black hole scattering processes.