Firewalls at exponentially late times

TL;DR

The paper probes firewall physics in a wormhole-rich JT gravity setting by summing all-genus wormhole contributions in a tau-scaling regime. It recasts interior slice evolution as a distribution over effective times $T_ ext{eff}$ and analyzes unperturbed and perturbed thermofield doubles, revealing a late-time firewall plateau where expanding and contracting interior slices become equally likely. Through exact path-integral decompositions and semiclassical scramblon analyses, it shows that wormholes can teleport perturbations and generate effective time-folds that alter shock propagation, sometimes turning safe configurations into dangerous ones and vice versa. The results uncover a rich structure of firewall probabilities that depend on perturbation configuration and time, with clear implications for interior experiences in holographic black holes and connections to random-matrix universality, while highlighting limitations and directions for making the model more realistic. Overall, wormholes fundamentally modify interior geometry by reshaping time contours into effective time-folds, producing nontrivial firewall statistics at exponentially late times in JT gravity.

Abstract

We consider a version of the typical state firewall setup recently reintroduced by Stanford and Yang, who found that wormholes may create firewalls. We examine a late-time double scaling limit in JT gravity in which one can resum the expansion in the number of wormholes, and we use this to study the exact distribution of interior slices at times exponential in the entropy. We consider a thermofield double with and without early perturbations on a boundary. These perturbations can appear on interior slices as dangerous high energy shocks. For exponentially late times, wormholes tend to teleport the particles created by perturbations and render the interior more dangerous. In states with many perturbations separated by large times, the probability of a safe interior is exponentially small. Such states thus almost certainly have firewalls at the horizon, even though they would be safe without wormholes. With perturbation, even in the safest state we conceive, the odds of encountering a firewall are fifty-fifty. One interpretation of the phenomena found here is that wormholes can change time-ordered contours into effective out-of-time-ordered folds, making shockwaves appear in unexpected places.