Violation of unitarity by Hawking radiation does not violate energy-momentum conservation
- Theoretical Physics Division, Rudjer Bošković Institute, P.O.B. 180, HR-10002 Zagreb (Croatia)
An argument by Banks, Susskind and Peskin (BSP), according to which violation of unitarity would violate either locality or energy-momentum conservation, is widely believed to be a strong argument against non-unitarity of Hawking radiation. We find that the whole BSP argument rests on the crucial assumption that the Hamiltonian is not highly degenerate, and point out that this assumption is not satisfied for systems with many degrees of freedom. Using Lindblad equation, we show that high degeneracy of the Hamiltonian allows local non-unitary evolution without violating energy-momentum conservation. Moreover, since energy-momentum is the source of gravity, we argue that energy-momentum is necessarily conserved for a large class of non-unitary systems with gravity. Finally, we explicitly calculate the Lindblad operators for non-unitary Hawking radiation and show that they conserve energy-momentum.
- Sponsoring Organization:
- SCOAP3, CERN, Geneva (Switzerland)
- OSTI ID:
- 22454535
- Journal Information:
- Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Vol. 2015, Issue 04; Other Information: PUBLISHER-ID: JCAP04(2015)002; OAI: oai:repo.scoap3.org:9836; Article funded by SCOAP3. Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1475-7516
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Hawking radiation, the Stefan–Boltzmann law, and unitarization
Entropy is conserved in Hawking radiation as tunneling: A revisit of the black hole information loss paradox