The black hole information paradox and holography

Abstract: Hawking theorized in 1974 that black holes emit particles as a quantum effect. It follows from this fact that a black hole that emits particles while absorbing none ends up evaporating. The process of black hole evaporation studied from semiclassical gravity violates quantum mechanics leading to serious problems. This is the black hole information paradox, one of the most famous paradoxes in theoretical physics first pointed out by Hawking in 1975 and still unsolved today. Nowadays the widespread interpretation is that quantum mechanics cannot be violated and that the semiclassical gravity approach is not good enough. We need to go beyond semiclassical physics to understand this process. The paradox as originally stated by Hawking is that a pure state evolves into a mixed state, violating unitarity and losing information in the process. There is also an alternative way to state the paradox using the so-called Page curve, which involves working with entropies rather than states. In a unitary process, the entanglement entropy of the radiation will follow the Page curve. In 2019, it was shown explicitly using holographic tools that an evaporating black hole in an Anti-de Sitter spacetime follows the Page curve. Holography is a property of quantum gravity stating that a spatial region can be described by its area rather than its volume. These recent developments also involve the famous island rule as the formula that reproduces the Page curve. This master thesis reviews the current understanding of the paradox, exploring the original paradox as well as the recent developments in the field.