2 Background: black holes and scrambling
In the thought experiments to follow, we will consider black holes that formed from the
gravitational collapse of matter and that eventually evaporate into a gas of Hawking ra-
diation. We will assume that the initial mass of any black hole that we consider is large
enough that physics outside the black hole is well-described by effective field theory on a
black hole background in regions of spacetime that are sufficiently distant from the end of
evaporation. We will also suppose that the process of black hole formation and evaporation
is a fundamentally unitary process. As such, if the matter that collapsed to form a black
hole was initially in a pure quantum state, then the state of the Hawking radiation after
evaporation — as well as any combined intermediate state of the black hole and hitherto
emitted Hawking radiation — is also a pure state.
Consider now some observer who resides outside the black hole. We will adopt the
viewpoint that such an observer’s observations are described according to complementar-
ity [4] and the membrane paradigm [19]. Explicitly, suppose that the black hole spacetime
is foliated by some set of achronal (spacelike or null) surfaces with respect to which the
observer performs field-theoretic calculations. In accordance with complementarity, an ob-
server outside the black hole should not associate a Hilbert space to an entire surface Σ if
it intersects the event horizon. In such a case, she instead organizes the physical Hilbert
space associated to Σ into a tensor product H = O ⊗D. The space O describes the degrees
of freedom on the portion of Σ that lies outside of the black hole, and D is a Hilbert space
that describes the black hole’s degrees of freedom and that is localized about the event
horizon (figure 1). From the outside observer’s point of view, all of physics is described by,
and all processes play out in, these two Hilbert spaces; she never has to (and in fact may
not) make reference to the the black hole interior.
5
We will suppose that D is localized to the stretched horizon of the black hole [4]. We
take the outer boundary of the stretched horizon to be at a proper distance on the order
of a Planck length above the event horizon. As such, the outer boundary of the stretched
horizon is a timelike surface with which an outside observer can interact.
Despite the fact that a complete theory of quantum gravity is not known and that the
full dynamics of black holes are not understood, it is widely expected that the quantum
state of matter gets scrambled when it enters the stretched horizon [21–23]. There are
many possible ways to define scrambling, but informally speaking, a system scrambles if
it diffuses quantum information over all its degrees of freedom. In particular, a black hole
has scrambled the information in a small subset D
0
⊂ D when any initial entanglement
between D
0
and the outside O gets distributed evenly throughout D, i.e., when almost all
small subsets of D have nearly the same amount of entanglement with O. After scrambling,
an observer cannot recover this entanglement unless she examines a sizable fraction of the
entire horizon D.
5
See also [20] (in particular section 4) as well as section 5.4 for further discussion of the way in which
H factorizes and the ways in which different factorizations are related as a consequence of assuming
complementarity.
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