2023/12/05 by Raphael Bousso, Geoff Penington, Bousso, Raphael +1 · 2 citations
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Particle Accelerators and Free-Electron Lasers #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Quantum Physics (quant-ph)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2312.03078
openalex publication_date 2023/12/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/03
Information located in an entanglement island in semiclassical gravity can be nonperturbatively reconstructed from distant radiation, implying a radical breakdown of effective field theory. We show that this occurs well outside of the black hole stretched horizon. We compute the island associated to large-angular momentum Hawking modes of a four-dimensional Schwarzschild black hole. These modes typically fall back into the black hole but can be extracted to infinity by relativistic strings or, more abstractly, by asymptotic boundary operators constructed using the timelike tube theorem. Remarkably, we find that their island can protrude a distance of order √ℓp r\rm hor outside the horizon. This is parametrically larger than the Planck scale ℓp and is comparable to the Bohr radius for supermassive black holes. Therefore, in principle, a distant observer can determine experimentally whether the black hole information paradox is resolved by complementarity, or by a firewall.