Black Hole Complementarity vs. Locality
David A. Lowe, Joseph Polchinski, Leonard Susskind, Larus Thorlacius, John Uglum
TL;DR
Evidence is presented that degrees of freedom inside a black hole should not be viewed as independent from those outside the event horizon, and commutators of spacelike separated operators corresponding to ordinary low-energy observers in Minkowski space are strongly suppressed in string theory.
Abstract
The evaporation of a large mass black hole can be described throughout most of its lifetime by a low-energy effective theory defined on a suitably chosen set of smooth spacelike hypersurfaces. The conventional argument for information loss rests on the assumption that the effective theory is a local quantum field theory. We present evidence that this assumption fails in the context of string theory. The commutator of operators in light-front string theory, corresponding to certain low-energy observers on opposite sides of the event horizon, remains large even when these observers are spacelike separated by a macroscopic distance. This suggests that degrees of freedom inside a black hole should not be viewed as independent from those outside the event horizon. These nonlocal effects are only significant under extreme kinematic circumstances, such as in the high-redshift geometry of a black hole. Commutators of space-like separated operators corresponding to ordinary low-energy observers in Minkowski space are strongly suppressed in string theory.