Black Hole Encryption

[Steve Schear]

What happens to the quantum information ingested by a black hole? In 1997, 
Thorne and Hawking argued that information swallowed by a black hole is 
forever hidden, despite the fact that these dense objects do emit a 
peculiar kind of radiation and eventually evaporate. Preskill countered 
that for quantum mechanics to remain valid, the theory mandates that the 
information has to be released from the evaporating black hole in some 
fashion. Although Hawking conceded in 2004, the disagreement between 
Preskill and Thorne still stands.

Smolin and Oppenheim now find that one of the main assertions made about 
black holes may be flawed. It is often assumed that as the black hole 
evaporates, all of the information gets stored in the remnant until the 
very end, at which point the information is either released or else 
disappears forever. Instead, Smolin and Oppenheim suggest that the 
information is distributed among the quanta thatescape during evaporation, 
but is encrypted and thus effectively locked away.

The catch is that it can only be accessed with the help of the quanta 
released when the black hole disappears, in much the same way as a 
cryptographic key unlocks a coded message. The result offers a link between 
general relativity and quantum cryptography. — DV

Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 081302 (2006).


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