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Entropy/information flux in Hawking radiation

Publication at Faculty of Mathematics and Physics |
2018

Abstract

Blackbody radiation contains (on average) an entropy of 3.9 +/- 2.5bits per photon. If the emission process is unitary, then this entropy is exactly compensated by " hidden information" in the correlations.

We extend this argument to the Hawking radiation from GR black holes, demonstrating that the assumption of unitarity leads to a perfectly reasonable entropy/information budget. The key technical aspect of our calculation is a variant of the "average subsystem" approach developed by Page, which we extend beyond bipartite pure systems, to a tripartite pure system that considers the influence of the environment.