Black hole final state conspiracies

Abstract

The principle that unitarity must be preserved in all processes, no matter how exotic, has led to deep insights into boundary conditions in cosmology and black hole theory. In the case of black hole evaporation, Horowitz and Maldacena were led to propose that unitarity preservation can be understood in terms of a restriction imposed on the wave function at the singularity. Gottesman and Preskill showed that this natural idea only works if one postulates the presence of "conspiracies" between systems just inside the event horizon and states at much later times, near the singularity. We argue that some AdS black holes have unusual internal thermodynamics, and that this may permit the required "conspiracies" if real black holes are described by some kind of sum over all AdS black holes having the same entropy. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.