Boundary unitarity and the black hole information paradox

Abstract

Both AdS/CFT duality and more general reasoning from quantum gravity point to a rich collection of boundary observables that always evolve unitarily. The physical quantum gravity states described by these observables must be solutions of the spatial diffeomorphism and Wheeler-deWitt constraints, which implies that the state space does not factorize into a tensor product of localized degrees of freedom. The "firewall" argument that unitarity of black hole S-matrix implies the presence of a highly excited quantum state near the horizon is based on such a factorization, hence is not applicable in quantum gravity. In fact, there appears to be no conflict between boundary unitarity and regularity of the event horizon.