App Unti 1 Extra

APPUNTI1extra
Giovanni Amelino-Camelia
Dipartimento di Fisica, Universita La Sapienza, P.le Moro 2, I-00185 Roma, Italy
1 Some other aspects of the quantum-gravity prob-

lem
For anything other than Black-hole thermodynamics and the information paradox
see appunti1 at http : //www.roma1.inf n.it/eamelino/qg2005.htm
Black-hole thermodynamics and the information paradox

Can we assume that information is conserved?
Besides the difficulties of the classical-apparatus limit, there are also other hints that
quantum-gravity might require a profoundly new framework (different from standard
quantum mechanics) from the information-theory perspective. In particular, there has
been much interest in the literature in an observation that originates from another
possible source of tension between general relativity and quantum mechanics. This
emerges if one attempts to guess how to adapt the equations of quantum mechanics to
situations in which there is a background spacetime of black-hole type. The analysis
of situations in which some particles fall into the black hole and there is some related
emission of particles by the black hole, through the Hawking-radiation mechanism,
suggests that information might not be conserved in this type of situations. A pure
state would evolve into a mixed state.
This analysis is still controversial (in the sense that not all researchers attribute the
same significance and attribute the same robustness to these results), but if confirmed
it would be of great significance: again it would indicate very clearly that quantum
gravity should actually not be a quantum mechanics of gravity. It would be very
different from a quantum mechanics, since it should accommodate loss of information.
Hawking radiation1
Up to the mid 1970s it was considered as a fact that the event horizon of a BH could
not decrease, which would mean that a BH, once produced, could never disappear
from spacetime. The (theory) results on Hawking radiation changed this scenario
dramatically. It was soon realized that a continuously radiating BH looses its mass
and eventually may disappear completely.
From the preliminary results indicating that the spectrum of emitted radiation
is thermal one is led to an information paradox. The information lost into the
1
following the structure of the relevant pages of gr-qc/0209007
1
BH (say a system of pure quantum states) is lost forever if it disappears at the end
of the evaporation process. In order to restore quantum-mechanical conservation of
information the Hawking radiation (rather than being a thermal mixture of quantum
states) should somehow encode the information corresponding to the matter which
has passed the event horizon. Or else the information could be released at the very
end of the evaporation process, when the BH is of Planckian size and only the correct
quantum-gravity theory (possibly through surprising new effects) can be applied. If
information is truly lost the unitarity of quantum mechanics is then violated.
The quantum mechanical effect that enables BHs to radiate away their mass is the
type of particle production that arises in situations in which a quantum vacuum of
some particle species interacts with an external field. One describes the vacuum as
filled with virtual particle-antiparticle pairs whose total energy is zero. Thus, one of
the virtual particles of a pair carries negative energy, while the other virtual particle
carries positive energy. For some virtual pairs the positive-energy particle will be on
the mass-shell2 Near a BH we can think of a particle with negative energy that falls
into the BH and thereby decreases its mass. As it is trapped in the BH we are not
confronted with the situation that a particle of negative energy might be measured.
The other particle (which is real) can escape to infinity, i.e. it is emitted by the BH.
This heuristic description of the emission process finds support in the technical
analysis (pertaining to the framework of field theory in curved spacetime backgrounds)
reported by Hawking in the mid 1970s. Hawking finds a purely thermal spectrum of
emitted radiation characterized by temperature TBH = (8M )1 , where M is the BH
mass.
Entropy-area relation
In the same spirit of the heuristic arguments leading to the conjecture of radiation
emitted by the black hole, it is possible to derive a relationship between the entropy
of a black hole and its (horizon-surface) area.
Bekenstein actually presented in 1973-1974 several heuristic arguments all leading
to the conclusion that the entropy and the area should be linearly related. One of
these arguments takes as starting point the general-relativity result3 establishing that
the minimum increase of area when the black hole absorbs a classical particle of energy
E and size s is A ' 8L2p Es (in natural units with h = c = 1). Bekenstein observed
that in order to describe the absorption of a quantum particle one must describe the
size of the particle in terms of the uncertainty in its position s x. Bekenstein
then enforced the requirement that a particle with position uncertainty x should at
least4 have energy E 1/x, which leads to A L2p . Moreover Bekenstein assumed
that the entropy depends only on the area of the black hole. Also using the fact that
the minimum increase of entropy should be also independent of the value of the area
2
If the particles interact with some external field they may acquire some additional energy, and in
some cases both particles become real and can be measured in a detector. This process is well-known
for strong electromagnetic fields.
3
D. Christodoulou, Phys. Rev. Lett. 25 (1970) 1596
4
E. M. Lifshitz, L. P. Pitaevskii and V. B. Berestetskii, Landau-Lifshitz Course of Theoreti-
cal Physics, Volume 4: Quantum Electrodynamics (Reed Educational and Professional Publishing,
1982).
2
(elementary notions on the description of entropy in terms of counting of microscopic
states leads to the conclusion that one bit of information carries entropy ln 2) one
then concludes that
dS min(S) 1
' 2 . (1)
dA min(A) Lp
From this it follows that
A
S . (2)
L2p
With the more detailed analysis (applying quantum field theory to matter fields in
the black-hole background) provided by Hawking one finds the value of the propor-
tionality coefficient
A
S . (3)
4L2p
One could derive the dependence of the black-hole temperature on the mass from
the entropy-area relation (which of course, since the horizon area is fixed by the mass, is
also an entropy-mass relation). In fact, from elementary thermodynamics we know that
T dS = dE, which for the case of a black hole takes the form T dS = dM , and from (3)
(combined with the relation between mass and horizon area for a Schwarzschild black
hole) one then finds indeed TBH = (8M )1 .
References
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Dipartimento di Fisica, Universita La Sapienza, P.le Moro 2, I-00185 Roma, Italy

1 Some other aspects of the quantum-gravity prob-

Black-hole thermodynamics and the information paradox

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