Replica wormholes, entanglement wedges and the black hole information paradox
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Hawking famously argued, based on semiclassical calculations, that the radiation from evaporating black holes is always perfectly thermal and contains no information about the matter that fell in. Such a result is inconsistent with the unitarity of quantum mechanics. In this thesis, I argue that a more careful replica trick calculation shows that the gravitational path integral becomes dominated at late times by saddles containing spacetime wormholes. These wormholes cause the entropy to decrease after the Page time, consistent with unitarity, and allow information to escape from the interior of the black hole. In very simple toy models, we can evaluate the path integral exactly, and see the information emerge. In more realistic black holes, the full wormhole solutions cannot be found explicitly. However, their existence, and their most important consequences, can be derived by studying the location and properties of a non-trivial `quantum extremal surface' in the original Hawking solution. We can also see how various paradoxes, including the famous rewall paradox, are avoided. A crucial role is played by the framework of universal subspace quantum error correction. This framework is also fundamental to the theory of quantum teleportation and can be used to decompose the process of sending qubits from Alice to Bob into distinct `entanglement' and `communication' pieces. Finally, we see how the complexity of decoding information from Hawking radiation can be explained by the existence of a bulge or `python's lunch' in the spacetime geometry
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2020; ©2020 |
| Publication date | 2020; 2020 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Penington, Geoffrey Richard |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Hayden, Patrick (Patrick M.) |
| Thesis advisor | Hayden, Patrick (Patrick M.) |
| Thesis advisor | Silverstein, Eva, 1970- |
| Thesis advisor | Susskind, Leonard |
| Degree committee member | Silverstein, Eva, 1970- |
| Degree committee member | Susskind, Leonard |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Physics. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Geoff Penington |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Physics |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2020 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2020 by Geoffrey Richard Penington
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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