1995/06/21 by David A. Lowe, Joseph Polchinski, Leonard Susskind +4 · 4 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Black hole (networking) #Classical mechanics #Commutator #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Event horizon #Minkowski space #Physics #Quantum Electrodynamics and Casimir Effect #Quantum mechanics #Spacetime #String theory #Theoretical physics #gr-qc #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.52.6997
published as Phys.Rev.D52:6997-7010,1995 · 32 pages, harvmac, 3 figures
arxiv created 1995/06/21 · openalex publication_date 1995/12/15 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The evaporation of a large mass black hole can be described throughout most of its lifetime by a low-energy effective theory defined on a suitably chosen set of smooth spacelike hypersurfaces. The conventional argument for information loss rests on the assumption that the effective theory is a local quantum field theory. We present evidence that this assumption fails in the context of string theory. The commutator of operators in light-front string theory, corresponding to certain low-energy observers on opposite sides of the event horizon, remains large even when these observers are spacelike separated by a macroscopic distance. This suggests that degrees of freedom inside a black hole should not be viewed as independent from those outside the event horizon. These nonlocal effects are only significant under extreme kinematic circumstances, such as in the high-redshift geometry of a black hole. Commutators of spacelike separated operators corresponding to ordinary low-energy observers in Minkowski space are strongly suppressed in string theory. \textcopyright 1995 The American Physical Society.