Informal HEP Talk - New Physics Near Black Holes

Informal HEP Talk - New Physics Near Black Holes Raphael Bousso, UC Berkeley Abstract: Information located in an entanglement island in semiclassical gravity can be nonperturbatively reconstructed from distant radiation, implying a radical breakdown of effective field theory. We show that this occurs well outside of the black hole stretched horizon. We compute the island associated to large angular momentum Hawking modes of a four-dimensional Schwarzschild black hole. These modes typically fall back into the black hole but can be extracted to infinity by relativistic strings or, more abstractly, by asymptotic boundary operators constructed using the timelike tube theorem. Remarkably, we find that their island can protrude a distance parametrically larger than the Planck scale and icomparable to the Bohr radius for supermassive black holes. Therefore, in principle, a distant observer can determine experimentally whether the black hole information paradox is resolved by complementarity, or by a firewall.