String Theory Seminars

Is Alice burning, fuzzing or merely falling?

by Dr. Borun Chowdhury (Univ. of Amsterdam)

Friday, December 14, 2012 from to (Asia/Kolkata)
at Colaba Campus ( A304 )
Description
I will go over the recent firewall debate.  I will argue that
unitarity requires every quantum of radiation leaving the black hole
to carry information about the initial state. Unitary evaporation is
thus inconsistent with an information-free horizon at every step of
the evaporation process.  To address the experience of an infalling
observer, I will argue for fuzzball complementarity. Unlike black hole
complementarity and observer complementarity which postulate
asymptotic observers experience a hot membrane while infalling ones
pass freely through the horizon, fuzzball complementarity postulates
that fine-grained operators experience the details of the fuzzball
microstate and coarse-grained operators experience the black hole. I
will along the way also discuss some other ideas that have come up to
address the firewall.