Recent Progress on the Black Hole Information Paradox

Abstract: The black hole information paradox is of central importance in the study of quantum gravity. The paradox states that quantum fields surrounding a black hole behave in ways that run into conflict with the unitarity of quantum mechanical time evolution. In the course of the past two years, new theoretical discoveries have made progress towards the paradox’s resolution, suggesting that unitarity can be saved. The central result is that a generalized entanglement entropy, originally arising in the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence, gives entanglement dynamics for the quantum fields that is consistent with unitarity. In this thesis, we review the black hole information paradox and the recent results. In addition, we explore a puzzling feature of the generalized entropy and show a novel result regarding the entanglement entropy in the interior of an evaporating black hole in the Russo-Susskind-Thorlacius model. We also apply an approximation scheme from condensed matter physics in a novel way, using a quasiparticle description to compute entanglement entropy in a moving-mirror model of black hole evaporation.