Resolving the black hole `fuzzball or wormhole' debate
Study adds more certainty to theory involving information paradox

Date:
January 4, 2022
Source:
Ohio State University
Summary:
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.



FULL STORY ========================================================================== 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.

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Ohio_State_University. Original
written by Laura Arenschield. Note: Content may be edited for style
and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Bin Guo, Marcel R. R. Hughes, Samir D. Mathur, Madhur
Mehta. Contrasting
the fuzzball and wormhole paradigms for black holes. Turkish
Journal of Physics, 2021 [abstract] ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/01/220104112233.htm
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