Study adds more certainty to theory involving information paradox
By Laura Arenschield, Ohio State News
January
4, 2022 -- Black holes really are giant fuzzballs, a new study says.
The study attempts to put to rest the
debate over Stephen Hawking’s famous information paradox, the problem created
by Hawking’s conclusion that any data that enters a black hole can never leave.
This conclusion accorded with the laws of thermodynamics, but opposed the
fundamental laws of quantum mechanics.
“What we found from string theory is
that all the mass of a black hole is not getting sucked in to the center,” said
Samir Mathur, lead author of the study and professor of physics at The Ohio
State University. “The black hole tries to squeeze things to a point, but then
the particles get stretched into these strings, and the strings start to
stretch and expand and it becomes this fuzzball that expands to fill up the
entirety of the black hole.”
The study, published Dec. 28 in the Turkish
Journal of Physics, found that string theory almost certainly holds the
answer to Hawking’s paradox, as the paper’s authors had originally believed.
The physicists proved theorems to show that the fuzzball theory remains the
most likely solution for Hawking’s information paradox. The researchers have
also published an essay showing how this work may resolve longstanding puzzles
in cosmology; the essay appeared in December in the International Journal of
Modern Physics.
Mathur published a study in 2004 that
theorized black holes were similar to very large, very messy balls of yarn –
“fuzzballs” that become larger and messier as new objects get sucked in.
“The bigger the black hole, the more
energy that goes in, and the bigger the fuzzball becomes,” Mathur said. The
2004 study found that string theory, the physics theory that holds that all
particles in the universe are made of tiny vibrating strings, could be the
solution to Hawking’s paradox. With this fuzzball structure, the hole radiates
like any normal body, and there is no puzzle.
After Mathur’s 2004 study and other,
similar works, “many people thought the problem was solved,” he said. “But in
fact, a section of people in the string theory community itself thought they
would look for a different solution to Hawking’s information paradox. They were
bothered that, in physical terms, the whole structure of the black hole had
changed.”
Studies in recent years attempted to
reconcile Hawking’s conclusions with the old picture of the hole, where one can
think of the black hole as being “empty space with all its mass in the
center.” One theory, the wormhole paradigm, suggested that black
holes might be one end of a bridge in the space-time continuum, meaning
anything that entered a black hole might appear on the other end of the bridge
– the other end of the wormhole – in a different place in space and time.
In order for the wormhole picture to
work, though, some low-energy radiation would have to escape from the black
hole at its edges.
This recent study proved a theorem – the
“effective small corrections theorem” – to show that if that were to happen,
black holes would not appear to radiate in the way that they do.
The researchers also examined physical
properties from black holes, including topology change in quantum gravity, to
determine whether the wormhole paradigm would work.
“In each of the versions that have been
proposed for the wormhole approach, we found that the physics was not
consistent,” Mathur said. “The wormhole paradigm tries to argue that, in some
way, you could still think of the black hole as being effectively empty with
all the mass in the center. And the theorems we prove show that such
a picture of the hole is not a possibility.”
Other Ohio State researchers who worked
on this study include Madhur Mehta, Marcel R. R. Hughes and Bin Guo.
https://news.osu.edu/resolving-the-black-hole-fuzzball-or-wormhole-debate/
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