2008/06/30 by Brett McInnes
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #gr-qc #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.nuclphysb.2008.08.007
published as Nucl.Phys.B807:33-55,2009 · Various minor improvements, references added, 25 pages
arxiv created 2008/07/23 · openalex publication_date 2008/08/10 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The principle that unitarity must be preserved in all processes, no matter how exotic, has led to deep insights into boundary conditions in cosmology and black hole theory. In the case of black hole evaporation, Horowitz and Maldacena were led to propose that unitarity preservation can be understood in terms of a restriction imposed on the wave function at the singularity. Gottesman and Preskill showed that this natural idea only works if one postulates the presence of "conspiracies" between systems just inside the event horizon and states at much later times, near the singularity. We argue that some AdS black holes have unusual internal thermodynamics, and that this may permit the required "conspiracies" if real black holes are described by some kind of sum over all AdS black holes having the same entropy.