Reanalyzing an evaporating black hole

Abstract

A coherent picture of the quantum mechanics of a collapse-formed, evaporating black hole is presented. In a distant frame, semiclassical theory in the zone describes microscopic dynamics of only the "hard modes," the modes that are hard enough to be discriminated in the timescale of Hawking emission. The thermal nature of these modes arises from microcanonical typicality of the full black hole degrees of freedom, mostly composed of the "soft modes," the modes that cannot be discriminated at the semiclassical level. The hard modes are purified by a combined system of the soft modes and early Hawking radiation, but not by either of them separately. This intrinsically tripartite structure of entanglement is general, regardless of the age of the black hole. The interior spacetime emerges only at a coarse-grained level. To describe it, an effective theory can be erected at each time, which applies only to a limited spacetime region determined by the time at which the theory is erected. The entire interior of the black hole can be described only using multiple effective theories erected at different times, realizing the idea of complementarity. We analyze implications of the entanglement structure described here for various phenomena, including Hawking evaporation and general information retrieval. For multiple entangled black holes, it implies that semiclassical objects dropped into different black holes cannot meet in the interior, although each object smoothly enters the horizon of the black hole to which it is falling. We also discuss physics in Rindler space, elucidating how it is obtained as a smooth limit of the black hole physics.