arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Yen Chin Ong.
A new solution of a unitary moving mirror is found to produce finite energy and emit thermal radiation despite the absence of an acceleration horizon. In the limit that the mirror approaches the speed of light, the model corresponds to a black hole formed from the collapse of a null shell. For speeds less than light, the black hole correspondence, if it exists, is that of a remnant.
Peripheral collisions of heavy ions can give rise to extremely intense magnetic fields. It has been suggested that these fields might invalidate the holographic description of the corresponding quark-gluon plasmas, assuming that these can be modelled by strongly coupled field theories. In the case of the plasmas produced in collisions at the RHIC facility (including in the beam energy scans), it is known how to deal with this problem: one has to take into account the large angular momenta generated in these plasmas, and the effects of the baryonic chemical potential. But this does not work for the plasmas produced in peripheral collisions at the LHC. However, these results neglect some (less significant) aspects of bulk physics; could it be that the problem is resolved by taking into account these lower-order effects? Here we use a bulk dilatonic field (fully compatible with boundary data, as well as with the asymptotically AdS character of the bulk geometry) as a model of these effects, and show that this is unlikely to be the solution. Thus, the existence of a consistent holographic description of the most extreme LHC plasmas remains open to question.
Recently a purportedly novel solution of the vacuum Einstein field equations was discovered: it supposedly describes an asymptotically flat twisted black hole in 4-dimensions whose exterior spacetime rotates in a peculiar manner -- the frame dragging in the northern hemisphere is opposite from that of the southern hemisphere, which results in a globally vanishing angular momentum. Furthermore it was shown that the spacetime has no curvature singularity. We show that the geometry of this black hole spacetime is nevertheless not free of pathological features. In particular, it harbors a rather drastic conical singularity along the axis of rotation. In addition, there exist closed timelike curves due to the fact that the constant r and constant t surfaces are not globally Riemannian. In fact, none of these are that surprising since the solution is just the Taub-NUT geometry. As such, despite the original claim that the twisted black hole might have observational consequences, it cannot be.
In the firewall proposal, it is assumed that the firewall lies near the event horizon and should not be observable except by infalling observers, who are presumably terminated at the firewall. However, if the firewall is located near where the horizon would have been, based on the spacetime evolution up to that time, later quantum fluctuations of the Hawking emission rate can cause the "teleological" event horizon to have migrated to the inside of the firewall location, rendering the firewall naked. In principle, the firewall can be arbitrarily far outside the horizon. This casts doubt about the notion that firewalls are the "most conservative" solution to the information loss paradox.
We provide some thoughts on the black hole information loss paradox, highlighting some important aspects of the problem that need to be addressed in order to resolve the paradox.
It was recently pointed out that if an absorbing boundary condition is imposed at infinity, an asymptotically anti-de Sitter Schwarzschild black hole with a spherical horizon takes only a finite amount of time to evaporate away even if its initial mass is arbitrarily large. We show that this is a rather generic property in AdS spacetimes: regardless of their horizon topologies, neutral AdS black holes in general relativity take about the same amount of time to evaporate down to the same size of order L, the AdS length scale. Our discussion focuses on the case in which the black hole has toral event horizon. A brief comment is made on the hyperbolic case, i.e. for black holes with negatively curved horizons.
The information loss paradox is often discussed from the perspective of the observers who stay outside of a black hole. However, the interior spacetime of a black hole can be rather nontrivial. We discuss the open problems regarding the volume of a black hole, and whether it plays any role in information storage. We also emphasize the importance of resolving the black hole singularity, if one were to resolve the information loss paradox.
Forty years after the discovery of Hawking radiation, its exact nature remains elusive. If Hawking radiation does not carry any information out from the ever shrinking black hole, it seems that unitarity is violated once the black hole completely evaporates. On the other hand, attempts to recover information via quantum entanglement lead to the firewall controversy. Amid the confusions, the possibility that black hole evaporation stops with a "remnant" has remained unpopular and is often dismissed due to some "undesired properties" of such an object. Nevertheless, as in any scientific debate, the pros and cons of any proposal must be carefully scrutinized. We fill in the void of the literature by providing a timely review of various types of black hole remnants, and provide some new thoughts regarding the challenges that black hole remnants face in the context of the information loss paradox and its latest incarnation, namely the firewall controversy. The importance of understanding the role of curvature singularity is also emphasized, after all there remains a possibility that the singularity cannot be cured even by quantum gravity. In this context a black hole remnant conveniently serves as a cosmic censor. We conclude that a remnant remains a possible end state of Hawking evaporation, and if it contains large interior geometry, may help to ameliorate the information loss paradox and the firewall controversy. We hope that this will raise some interests in the community to investigate remnants more critically but also more thoroughly.
As with any black hole, asymptotically anti-de Sitter Kerr black holes are described by a small number of parameters, including a "mass parameter" $M$ that reduces to the AdS-Schwarzschild mass in the limit of vanishing angular momentum. In sharp contrast to the asymptotically flat case, the horizon area of such a black hole increases with the angular momentum parameter $a$ if one fixes $M$, this appears to mean that the Penrose process in this case would violate the Second Law of black hole thermodynamics. We show that the correct procedure is to fix not $M$ but rather the "physical" mass $E=M/(1-a^2/L^2)^2$, this is motivated by the First Law. For then the horizon area decreases with $a$. We recommend that $E$ always be used as the mass in physical processes: for example, in attempts to "over-spin" AdS-Kerr black holes.
Classically, black holes admit maximal interior volumes that grow asymptotically linearly in time. We show that such volumes remain large when Hawking evaporation is taken into account. Even if a charged black hole approaches the extremal limit during this evolution, its volume continues to grow; although an exactly extremal black hole does not have a "large interior". We clarify this point and discuss the implications of our results to the information loss and firewall paradoxes.
Christodoulou and Rovelli have shown that black holes have large interiors that grow asymptotically linearly in advanced time, and speculated that this may be relevant to the information loss paradox. We show that there is no simple relation between the interior volume of an arbitrary black hole and its horizon area. That is, the volume enclosed is not necessarily a monotonically increasing function of the surface area.
It is recently argued that if the Hawking radiation process is unitary, then a black hole's mass cannot be monotonically decreasing. We examine the time dependent particle count and negative energy flux in the non-trivial conformal vacuum via the moving mirror approach. A new, exactly unitary solution is presented which emits a characteristic above-thermal positive energy burst, a thermal plateau, and negative energy flux. It is found that the characteristic positive energy flare and thermal plateau is observed in the particle outflow. However, the results of time dependent particle production show no overt indication of negative energy flux. Therefore, a black hole's birth cry is detectable by asymptotic observers via particle count, whereas its death gasp is not.
Holographic duality relates two radically different kinds of theory: one with gravity, one without. The very existence of such an equivalence imposes strong consistency conditions which are, in the nature of the case, hard to satisfy. Recently a particularly deep condition of this kind, relating the minimum of a probe brane action to a gravitational bulk action (in a Euclidean formulation), has been recognised; and the question arises as to the circumstances under which it, and its Lorentzian counterpart, are satisfied. We discuss the fact that there are physically interesting situations in which one or both versions might, in principle, \emph{not} be satisfied. These arise in two distinct circumstances: first, when the bulk is not an Einstein manifold, and, second, in the presence of angular momentum. Focusing on the application of holography to the quark-gluon plasma (of the various forms arising in the early Universe and in heavy-ion collisions), we find that these potential violations never actually occur. This suggests that the consistency condition is a "law of physics" expressing a particular aspect of holography.
It was recently argued that f(T) gravity could inherit "remnant symmetry" from the full Lorentz group, despite the fact that the theory is not locally Lorentz invariant. Confusion has arisen regarding the implication of this result for the previous works, which established that f(T) gravity is pathological due to superluminal propagation, local acausality, and non-unique time evolution. We clarify that the existence of the "remnant group" does not rid the theory of these various problems, but instead strongly supports it.
Electrically charged black holes with flat event horizon in anti-de Sitter space have received much attention due to various applications in Anti-de Sitter/Conformal Field Theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence, from modeling the behavior of quark-gluon plasma to superconductor. Crucial to the physics on the dual field theory is the fact that when embedded in string theory, black holes in the bulk may become vulnerable to instability caused by brane pair-production. Since dilaton arises naturally in the context of string theory, we study the effect of coupling dilaton to Maxwell field on the stability of flat charged AdS black holes. In particular, we study the stability of Gao-Zhang black holes, which are locally asymptotically anti-de Sitter. We find that for dilaton coupling parameter $α$ > 1, flat black holes are stable against brane pair production, however for 0 < $α$ < 1, the black holes eventually become unstable as the amount of electrical charges is increased. Such instability however, behaves somewhat differently from that of flat Reissner-Nordström black holes. In addition, we prove that the Seiberg-Witten action of charged dilaton AdS black hole of Gao-Zhang type with flat event horizon (at least in 5-dimension) is always logarithmically divergent at infinity for finite values of $α$, and is finite and positive in the case $α$ tends to infinity . We also comment on the robustness of our result for other charged dilaton black holes that are not of Gao-Zhang type.
Firewalls are controversial principally because they seem to imply departures from general relativistic expectations in regions of spacetime where the curvature need not be particularly large. One of the virtues of the Harlow-Hayden approach to the firewall paradox, concerning the time available for decoding of Hawking radiation emanating from charged AdS black holes, is precisely that it operates in the context of cold black holes, which are not strongly curved outside the event horizon. Here we clarify this point. The approach is based on ideas borrowed from applications of the AdS/CFT correspondence to the quark-gluon plasma. Firewalls aside, our work presents a detailed analysis of the thermodynamics and evolution of evaporating charged AdS black holes with flat event horizons. We show that, in one way or another, these black holes are always eventually destroyed in a time which, while long by normal standards, is short relative to the decoding time of Hawking radiation.
A $(3+1)$-dimensional asymptotically flat Kerr black hole angular speed $Ω_+$ can be used to define an effective spring constant, $k=mΩ_+^2$. Its maximum value is the Schwarzschild surface gravity, $k = κ$, which rapidly weakens as the black hole spins down and the temperature increases. The Hawking temperature is expressed in terms of the spring constant: $2πT = κ- k$. Hooke's law, in the extremal limit, provides the force $F = 1/4$, which is consistent with the conjecture of maximum force in general relativity.
At the heart of the black hole information loss paradox and the firewall controversy lies the conflict between quantum mechanics and general relativity. Much has been said about quantum corrections to general relativity, but much less in the opposite direction. It is therefore crucial to examine possible corrections to quantum mechanics due to gravity. Indeed, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is one profound feature of quantum mechanics, which nevertheless may receive correction when gravitational effects become important. Such generalized uncertainty principle [GUP] has been motivated from not only quite general considerations of quantum mechanics and gravity, but also string theoretic arguments. We examine the role of GUP in the context of black hole complementarity. We find that while complementarity can be violated by large N rescaling if one assumes only the Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the application of GUP may save complementarity, but only if certain N-dependence is also assumed. This raises two important questions beyond the scope of this work, i.e., whether GUP really has the proposed form of N-dependence, and whether black hole complementarity is indeed correct.