Black holes as Andreev reflecting mirrors

Abstract

We propose a microscopic quantum description for Hawking radiation as Andreev reflections, which resolves the quantum information paradox at black hole event horizons. The detailed microscopic analysis presented here reveals how a black hole, treated as an Andreev reflecting mirror, provides a manifestly unitary description of an evaporating black hole, expanding our previous analysis presented in [S. K. Manikandan and A. N. Jordan, Phys. Rev. D 96, 124011 (2017), S. K. Manikandan and A. N. Jordan, Phys. Rev. D 98, 124043 (2018)]. In our analogy, a black hole resolves the information paradox by accepting particles---pairing them with the infalling Hawking quanta into a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) like quantum ground state---while Andreev reflects the quantum information as encoded in outgoing Hawking radiation. The present approach goes beyond the black hole final state proposal by Horowitz and Maldacena [J. High Energy Phys. 02 (2004) 008] by providing necessary microscopic details which allows us to circumvent important shortcomings of the black hole final state proposal. We also generalize the present Hamiltonian description to make an analogy to the apparent loss of quantum information possible in an Einstein-Rosen bridge via crossed Andreev reflections.