Abstract
Black holes emit thermal radiation (Hawking effect). If after black-hole evaporation nothing else were left, an arbitrary initial state would evolve into a thermal state (‘information-loss problem’). Here it is argued that the whole evolution is unitary and that the thermal nature of Hawking radiation emerges solely through decoherence – the irreversible interaction with further degrees of freedom. For this purpose a detailed comparison with an analogous case in cosmology (entropy of primordial fluctuations) is presented. Some remarks on the possible origin of black-hole entropy due to interaction with other degrees of freedom are added. This might concern the interaction with quasi-normal modes or with background fields in string theory.
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© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg
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Kiefer, C. (2004). Is There an Information-Loss Problem for Black Holes?. In: Elze, HT. (eds) Decoherence and Entropy in Complex Systems. Lecture Notes in Physics, vol 633. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-40968-7_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-40968-7_6
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Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-20639-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-40968-7
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