Decoherence and the fate of an infalling wave packet: Is Alice burning or fuzzing?
- 6 September 2013
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Physical Society (APS) in Physical Review D
- Vol. 88 (6) , 063509
Abstract
Recently, Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski, and Sully have suggested a Gedankenexperiment to test black hole complementarity. They claim that the postulates of black hole complementarity are mutually inconsistent and choose to give up the “absence of drama” for an infalling observer. According to them, the black hole is shielded by a firewall no later than Page time. This has generated some controversy. We find that an interesting picture emerges when we take into account objections from the advocates of fuzzballs. We reformulate Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski, and Sully’s Gedankenexperiment in the decoherence picture of quantum mechanics and find that low energy wave packets interact with the radiation quanta rather violently while high energy wave packets do not. This is consistent with Mathur’s recent proposal of fuzzball complementarity for high energy quanta falling into fuzzballs.Keywords
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