Monday, August 13, 2012

1208.2026 (Borun D. Chowdhury et al.)

Is Alice burning or fuzzing?    [PDF]

Borun D. Chowdhury, Andrea Puhm
Recently, Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski and Sully have suggested a Gedanken experiment to test black hole complementarity. They claim that the postulates of black hole complimentarily are mutually inconsistent and choose to give up the "absence of drama" for an in-falling observer. According to them, at least after Page time, the black hole is shielded by a firewall. This has generated some controversy. In our opinion a lot of this is caused by confusions stemming from an observer-centric language. In this letter we formulate the AMPS's Gedanken experiment in the decoherence picture of quantum mechanics without invoking any sentient beings. While we find that the objections raised by advocates of observer complimentarily are irrelevant, an interesting picture emerges when we take into account objections from the advocates of fuzzballs. We find that low energy wave packets "burn up" like AMPS claim while high energy wavepackets do not. This is consistent with Mathur's recent proposal of approximate complementarity for high energy quanta. Within the fuzzball proposal AMPS's firewall fits in nicely as the thermal bath that low energy in-coming quanta perceive.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.2026

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