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Samuel L. Braunstein
Computer Science, University of York, York YO10 5DD, UK
(Dated: July 7, 2009)
The equivalence principle provides an important tenet of black hole physics: that a sufficiently
small observer freely falling into a black hole should experience nothing special as she passes the
event horizon — the boundary of no return. Similarly, quantum fields impinging on a black hole
should exhibit no special behavior at the event horizon. Indeed quantum fields should be entangled
across the event horizon just as they would be across the boundary to any volume in flat space.
We study this claim using random subsystems as models of black hole evaporation. We find that
unless the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of a black hole is almost entirely entropy of entanglement,
arXiv:0907.1190v1 [quant-ph] 7 Jul 2009
then the trans-event horizon entanglement vanishes long before the black hole has evaporated to the
Planck scale. This would force quantum fields across the event horizon to be arbitrarily far from
the vacuum state; an energetic curtain would have descended around the black hole.
Cutting out a volume of space across which a quantum subsystem R with the remaining interior subsystem B.
field propagates yields entanglement between the subsys- When incorporating trans-event horizon entanglement
tems so formed. For fields (or condensed matter systems) into the evaporative dynamics, Page’s model becomes
in or close to the ground state, the entropy of this entan- √ √
glement scales as the surface area of the boundary [1]. ∑ pi ∣i⟩ext ⊗ ∣i⟩int → ∑ pi ∣i⟩ext ⊗ (U ∣i⟩)RB .
i i
One can mentally grow or shrink the volume, and the en-
tanglement responds accordingly, but in a manner which Here ∑i pi ∣i⟩⟨i∣ is the reduced density matrix of the ex-
is essentially decoupled from any underlying dynamics. ternal (ext) modes neighboring the event horizon. The
For a black hole, a distinguished boundary, namely the entropy of entanglement may be quantified with a Rényi
event horizon, is chosen by causality. Classically, the entropy Hext (≤ SBH ) for this state. As the logarithm
internal degrees of freedom of trans-event horizon entan- of the dimension of the radiation subsystem grows to
glement are forbidden from escaping even as the black ln[dim(R)] = 21 SBH + 21 Hext + c the initial trans-event
hole’s surface area shrinks due to quantum evaporation horizon entanglement between the external neighborhood
[2]. The only way for this entanglement to scale down and the interior subsystems has virtually vanished, with
with the black hole’s thermodynamic entropy is to leave it appearing instead (with a fidelity of at least 1 − e−c ) as
through some quantum mechanical tunneling process [3]. entanglement between external neighborhood modes and
We claim that unlike trans-boundary entanglement in flat the outgoing radiation (see Appendix B).
space, trans-event horizon entanglement within a black In an arbitrary system where trans-boundary entan-
hole must participate within the underlying (evapora- glement has vanished, the quantum field cannot be in or
tive) dynamics. anywhere near its ground state. Applied to black holes, a
A powerful tool for studying unitary dynamics in high loss of trans-event horizon entanglement implies fields far
dimensional systems is random matrix theory. Indeed, from the vacuum state in the vicinity of the event horizon.
numerical simulations show that for the quantities stud- Were this to happen before the black hole had evaporated
ied here individual randomly selected unitaries yield al- to the Planck scale, at ln[dim(R)] ≈ SBH , there would be
most identical results as analytically computed averages. a manifest failure of the equivalence principle. Therefore
Thus, unless the black hole dynamics is from a vanish- either the thermodynamic entropy of black holes is due
ingly small set, averages over random unitaries should primarily to entropy of entanglement, i.e., SBH ≈ Hext ,
give an excellent approximation to the actual dynamics. or the randomly selected subsystem model of black hole
In particular, Don Page [4] pioneered this approach for evaporation is missing an important subtlety.
modeling black hole evaporation as the ‘budding off’ of We are not the first to conjecture that a black hole’s
random subsystems from the interior Hilbert space of a thermodynamic entropy is entropy of entanglement [7, 8,
black hole to represent outgoing radiation [4, 5, 6]. Page 9, 10, 11, 12]. Indeed, it unavoidably holds for some mod-
argued that the Hilbert space dimensionality of this in- els of eternal black holes [10, 11] and even resolves some
terior space should be well approximated by N = eSBH , difficulties associated with computing their entropy at
in terms of the thermodynamic entropy SBH = A/4 of the microscopic level [12]. The argument above demon-
a black hole of area A. He assumed an initially pure strates that in models of dynamically evolving black
state ∣i⟩int for the black hole interior (int), so evapora- holes, unless this conjecture holds at least approximately,
tion becomes ∣i⟩int → (U ∣i⟩)RB . Here a random unitary it is time to draw a curtain on some of the equivalence
U ∈ U (N ) is followed by the ‘emission’ of radiation into principle’s cherished predictions.
2
The author gratefully acknowledges the hospitality of the where the joint subsystems Y = Y1 Y2 will be decomposed
Frank Graham Research House. as either the radiation modes and interior black holes
modes RB or vice-versa BR. This allows us to define
APPENDIX A
U
σXY2Z
≡ trY1 (UY ρXY Z UY ). (5)
1 E 1 E − 2 tr ρXZ (ρX
1−2ν
⊗ ρZ
1−2µ
) + tr ρX
2−2ν 2−2µ
tr ρZ ]
√ ∑ ∣i⟩ext ⊗ ∣i⟩int → √ ∑ ∣i⟩ext ⊗ (U ∣i⟩)RB . (1)
+ [tr ρ2XY Z (ρ−2ν
X ⊗ ρZ )
E i=1 E i=1 Y2 −2µ
Y1
Here ln E is the entropy of entanglement between the
+ tr ρX Z ]}
tr ρ2Y Z ρ−2µ
2−2ν
external (ext) modes neighboring the event horizon and (6)
the interior of the black hole. Except for the interpreta-
X tr ρZ [tr ρXY Z (ρX ⊗ ρZ )
tion of the source of entanglement, this model has been Y2 2µ −2ν −2µ
≤ tr ρ2ν 2
recently analyzed by Hayden and Preskill [5]. We may Y1
+ tr ρX Z ]
therefore quote their key result in our terms: As the loga- 2−2ν
tr ρ2Y Z ρ−2µ (7)
rithm of the dimension of the radiation subsystem grows
to 21 SBH + 12 ln E + c the initial trans-event horizon en- Y2 HX +HZ
tanglement between the external neighborhood and the ≤ 2 e , (8)
Y1
interior subsystems has virtually vanished, with it ap-
pearing instead (with a fidelity of at least 1 − e−c ) as where HA ≡ H (1/2) (ρA ) and 0 ≤ 2ν, 2µ ≤ 1. Here, to go
entanglement between external neighborhood modes and from Eq. (6) to Eq. (7), we assume ρXZ = ρX ⊗ ρZ ; and
the outgoing radiation. Here (as in the manuscript) c to go from Eq. (7) to Eq. (8), we assume ρXY Z is pure
is a free parameter, but will be dwarfed by any of the and we take 2ν = 2µ = 21 .
entropies involved.
Below we shall see that when the uniform entanglement Proof: Using the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality we may
of the above analysis is replaced with general trans-event write
∥σXY ⊗ σYU2 Z ∥1
horizon entanglement, the measure of entanglement ln E
is replaced by the Rényi entropy Hext .
U
2Z
− σX
U
(9)
≤ ∥ρνX ⊗ 11Y2 ⊗ ρµZ ∥2 ∥ρ−ν
X Z (σXY2 Z
⊗ ρ−µ U
− σX
U
⊗ σYU2 Z )∥2 ,
− σext ) . (10)
Y2 Hext 2
∫
U U
e
interest to us here will be the fractional Rényi entropy U∈U(Y )
2
Y1
for q = 12 , so
Now 1 − F (ρ, σ) ≤ 12 ∥ρ − σ∥1 , where the trace norm is
√ by ∥X∥1 ≡ tr ∣X∣ and the fidelity by F (ρ, σ) ≡
Hext ≡ H (1/2) (ρext ) = ln [(tr ρext )2 ]. (3) √ √
defined
∥ ρ σ∥1 . As a consequence, the fidelity with which
Our key result is based on a generalization of the de- the initial trans-event horizon entanglement is encoded
coupling theorem of Ref. 13. Consider now the tripartite within the√combined ext, Y1 subsystem is bounded below
state by [6] 1 − eHext Y2 /Y1 . Now allowing this in turn to be
bounded from below by 1 − e−c and choosing Y1 = R and
ρXY Z = ρXY1 Y2 Z , (4) Y2 = B gives the result quoted in the manuscript.
3
Interestingly, the opposite choice Y1 = B and Y2 = R black hole to transform all the information about the
tells us that for the logarithm of the dimension of the in-fallen matter into its quantum one-time pad. Both
radiation subsystem less than 12 (SBH − Hext ) − c the ini- the encoding and decoding occur during the radiation of
tial trans-event horizon entanglement remains encoded k + 21 (Hext − H̃ext ) + 2c qunats, where H̃ext ≡ H (2) (ρext )
between the external neighborhood and the interior sub- is another Rényi entropy. Since typically Hext − H̃ext ≲
systems with fidelity of at least 1 − e−c . This effectively O(1), and this quantity cannot become negative, this im-
gives the number of qunats (ln 2 times the number of plies that the encoding (and decoding) of the black hole’s
qubits) that must be radiated before trans-event horizon quantum one-time pad occurs at roughly the radiation
entanglement begins to be depleted; for Hext ≈ SBH this emission rate.
occurs almost immediately.
Including matter: A recent paper [6] considers matter
(entangled with some distant reference, ref, subsystem) Black hole entropy sum rule? We recall (see, e.g.,
which collapses to form a black hole, which itself exhibits T. Nishioka et al. arXiv:0905.0932) that the entropy of
trans-event horizon entanglement, via entanglement of quantum fields piercing a black hole’s
event horizon is expected to be proportional to the num-
1 K √
√ ∑ ∣i⟩ref ⊗ ∑ pj (∣i⟩ ⊗ ∣j⟩ ⊕ 0)int ⊗ ∣j⟩ext (11)
ber of matter fields, however, the black hole’s thermo-
K i=1 j dynamic entropy is purely geometric. To preserve the
√
equivalence principle, therefore, our result would appear
1 K
→ √ ∑ ∣i⟩ref ⊗ ∑ pj [U (∣i⟩ ⊗ ∣j⟩ ⊕ 0)]RB ⊗ ∣j⟩ext , to imply that black hole entropy provides a “sum rule”
K i=1 j quantifying the number of matter fields. The tools neces-
sary to calculate such a sum rule in a cut-off independent
where here k = ln K is the number of qunats of quantum
manner do not yet appear to be available.
information in the in-fallen matter and where again we
assume the initial dimensionality of the black hole inte-
rior is well approximated by its thermodynamic entropy,
so N = dim(int) = RB = eSBH . It will also be convenient
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