BH=SC

Post date: Dec 12, 2017 3:27:10 AM

Black holes are objects predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and are so massive that light cannot escape from their gravitational attraction. They have also been the subject of intense debate for the past 50 years, regarding their quantum mechanical behavior, and in particular what happens to information that enters the black hole: Is it destroyed, or can it somehow escape? In a new paper published in Phys. Rev. D, Sreenath Kizhakkumpurath and I have shown how many features of the quantum physics of black holes are analogous to a very different field of physics: superconductors. We argue that the black hole event horizon (the point of no return) is similar to a metal-superconductor interface. If information contained in the spin of an electron in the metal is thrown into the superconductor, the superconductor can accept the electron, but not the information. A “hole”, or the absence of an electron, must be ejected from the superconductor which carries the information away. A similar mechanism has been proposed to solve the black hole information problem - the information inside the black hole is not lost because it can never enter the black hole - the Hawking radiation near the event horizon plays a similar role in carrying away information of particles that enter the black hole. We develop several other parallels between these two areas of physics, including the idea that a wormhole connecting two universes is similar to a process known as “crossed Andreev reflection”, where an electron’s information in one metal can be teleported across a superconductor to a hole entering a different metal. Both quantum information theoretic and thermodynamic analysis of these different problems yields striking parallels. By exploiting this analogy, it is proposed that laboratory studies may shed greater light on one of the great debates of the century, the quantum physics of black holes.

The paper is published in PRD:

https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.96.124011