Geometry of the infalling causal patch

Abstract

The firewall paradox states that an observer falling into an old black hole must see a violation of unitarity, locality, or the equivalence principle. Motivated by this remarkable conflict, we analyze the causal structure of black hole spacetimes in order to determine whether all the necessary ingredients for the paradox fit within a single observer's causal patch. We particularly focus on the question of whether the interior partner modes of the outgoing Hawking quanta can, in principle, be measured by an infalling observer. Since the relevant modes are spread over the entire sphere, we answer a simple geometrical question: can any observer see an entire sphere behind the horizon? We find that for all static black holes in 3+1 and higher dimensions, with any value of the cosmological constant, no single observer can see both the early Hawking radiation and the interior modes. We present a detailed description of the causal patch geometry of the Schwarzschild black hole in 3+1 dimensions, where an infalling observer comes closest to being able to measure the relevant modes.