09.11.2021 (Tuesday)

Black holes, information and wormholes

Regular Seminar Geoff Penington (UC Berkeley and IAS)

at:
15:00 IC
room Online
abstract:

Hawking famously argued, based on semiclassical calculations, that the radiation from evaporating black holes is contains no information about the matter that fell in. This would be inconsistent with the unitarity of quantum mechanics. In this talk, I will show that, in more careful ‘replica trick’ calculations, the gravitational path integral becomes dominated at late times by saddles containing spacetime wormholes. These wormholes cause the entropy to decrease after the Page time, consistent with unitarity, and allow information to escape from the interior of the black hole.