Black hole evaporation: information loss but no paradox

Abstract

The process of black hole evaporation resulting from the Hawking effect has generated an intense controversy regarding its potential conflict with quantum mechanics' unitary evolution. In a recent couple of works of a collaboration involving one of us, we have revised the controversy with the aims of, on the one hand, clarifying some conceptual issues surrounding it, and, at the same time, arguing that collapse theories have the potential to offer a satisfactory resolution of the so-called paradox. Here we show an explicit calculation supporting this claim using a simplified model of black hole creation and evaporation, known as the CGHS model, together with a dynamical reduction theory, known as CSL, and some speculative, but seemingly natural ideas about the role of quantum gravity in connection with the would-be singularity. This work represents a specific realization of general ideas first discussed in [1].