3 Alpha-bits from the Hawking radiation
In this section we argue based on simple qubit toy models that an evaporating black hole
reveals its α-bits through its Hawking radiation as quickly as possible, saturating the α-bit
capacity of a noiseless quantum channel. This is in sharp contrast with the usual notion
that the Hawking radiation tries to hide information about the black hole state for as
long as possible, but we shall show that the two ideas are not merely reconcilable but in
fact equivalent. We generalise the arguments made by Hayden and Preskill in [14], which
can be interpreted as describing the special case where α = 0. This section is relatively
self-contained and is not necessary to understand the main claims of the paper, which are
developed in section 4; however, it is both of interest in its own right and features strong
similarities to the way the α-bits of black holes are encoded in AdS/CFT — suggesting
that the lessons from AdS/CFT may well be important in a significantly broader context.
It is often incorrectly implied that the Hawking radiation contains no information
until the Page time, after which it begins to reveal the qubits of the black hole one by
one. In fact there is good reason to think that (at least in simple toy models) not a single
qubit of the black hole will be revealed, to an observer knowing nothing about the original
black hole state, until the black hole has almost entirely evaporated.
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Instead, after the
Page time, the α-bits of the entire black hole will be revealed for increasing values of α,
until eventually all the qubits are revealed, essentially simultaneously, at the very end of
the evaporation process. No particular subsystem is revealed before any other subsystem;
however, increasingly large subspaces of the entire system become decodable.
Consider a large semiclassical black hole A in a pure microstate that is already known
by some observer Bob. Alice wants to hide her diary D, a small quantum state, from Bob
by dropping it into this black hole. After she has done so, Bob knows that the black hole
is in some particular small-dimensional subspace of the large Hilbert space of black hole
microstates — specifically the subspace of states that could have been created by the diary
falling in. In the semiclassical limit, the dimension of the space of black hole microstates
tends to infinity, while the dimension of the small subspace remains fixed.
The black hole is then allowed to evaporate into Hawking radiation. We assume Bob
has a perfect understanding of the microscopic dynamics of the black hole and the ability
to collect all the Hawking radiation that is emitted by it, as well as infinite computational
power. However, even with these awesome powers, he has no ability to measure the internal
black hole degrees of freedom themselves. How long does Bob have to wait in order to
determine the original state of the diary with a high degree of confidence?
This question was studied in detail in [14]. Since the dynamics of the black hole interior
are expected to be highly chaotic, Bob cannot hope for the small subspace of possible black
hole states that could have been created by the diary to be especially easy to decode from
the Hawking radiation. The problem is essentially equivalent to the question of whether
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More precisely, there will no tensor product factorisation of the black hole H
BH
∼
=
H
qubit
⊗ H
rest
such
that the reduced state on H
qubit
can be determined from the Hawking radiation before the black hole has
almost evaporated, even if the dimension of H
qubit
is only two.
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