Welcome to the new version of CaltechAUTHORS. Login is currently restricted to library staff. If you notice any issues, please email coda@library.caltech.edu
Published September 1, 2007 | public
Journal Article Open

Black holes as mirrors: quantum information in random subsystems

Abstract

We study information retrieval from evaporating black holes, assuming that the internal dynamics of a black hole is unitary and rapidly mixing, and assuming that the retriever has unlimited control over the emitted Hawking radiation. If the evaporation of the black hole has already proceeded past the ``half-way'' point, where half of the initial entropy has been radiated away, then additional quantum information deposited in the black hole is revealed in the Hawking radiation very rapidly. Information deposited prior to the half-way point remains concealed until the half-way point, and then emerges quickly. These conclusions hold because typical local quantum circuits are efficient encoders for quantum error-correcting codes that nearly achieve the capacity of the quantum erasure channel. Our estimate of a black hole's information retention time, based on speculative dynamical assumptions, is just barely compatible with the black hole complementarity hypothesis.

Additional Information

© 2007 SISSA. Received 31 August 2007, accepted for publication 19 September 2007. Published 26 September 2007. We are grateful for the hospitality of the Perimeter Institute, where we had the good fortune to share an office, and JP thanks PH for letting him use the comfortable chair. We also thank Ashton Anderson, Hilary Carteret, Daniel Gottesman, Dennis Kretschmann, Seth Lloyd, Prakash Panangaden, David Poulin, Renato Renner, Lenny Susskind, Kip Thorne, Bill Unruh, Andreas Winter, Jon Yard, and the participants in the 2007 McGill-Bellairs Quantum Information Workshop for helpful suggestions. This research is supported in part by the Canada Research Chairs program, the Sloan Foundation, CIFAR, FQRNT, MITACS, NSERC, DoE under Grant No. DE-FG03-92-ER40701, NSF under Grant No. PHY-0456720, and NSA under ARO Contract No. W911NF-05-1-0294. Preprint http://arxiv.org/abs/0708.4025

Files

HAYjhep07.pdf
Files (294.3 kB)
Name Size Download all
md5:385766ce6427aba2a8ab660487d2f3bc
294.3 kB Preview Download

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
March 5, 2024