Yes, lasers.
So what the heck have lasers got to do with black holes? Technically, we’re not talking about the little flashy devices you use to keep your cat entertained, we’re talking about the underlying physics that produces laser light and applying it to information that falls into a black hole.
Laser is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. In its simplest form, laser light is generated inside a cavity where a photon will interact with a material, simulating it and amplifying the output. The process cascades to generate a beam of collimated and coherent light that is very useful for communications, industry and entertainment.
“Basically, it works like a copy machine: you throw something into the machine, and two identical somethings come out,” said Chris Adami, a physics professor at Michigan State University. If you apply this mechanism to an event horizon as matter falls into a black hole, according to Adami, we may have some kind of solution to the black hole “firewall paradox.”
Adami co-wrote a paper based on this research with Greg Ver Steeg of University of Southern California, Los Angeles, that was published in the April 7 edition of the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.
The firewall is an uneasy solution to decades of debate in the physics world around information falling into a black hole.
In the 1970s, renowned black hole physicist Stephen Hawking made the realization that black holes aren’t totally black. Taking his cue from quantum physics, pairs of virtual particles are predicted to pop into existence, annihilate with each other and then disappear. But right at the edge of an event horizon — the point at which spacetime warping around a black hole is so extreme even light cannot escape the black hole’s grasp — one of these virtual particles may become trapped and pulled away from being annihilated by its partner, making the escaping particle “real,” leaching a tiny amount of mass from the black hole.
This slight “evaporation” of mass became known as Hawking radiation and completely revolutionized our perspective on black holes — depending on their mass, they will evaporate and eventually disappear. Black holes aren’t as permanent we once thought.
The formulation of Hawking radiation heralded the beginning of some hefty theoretical hurt and it all boiled down to how black holes deal with information. The information contained within the matter falling into a black hole is ultimately destroyed by its total evaporation out of existence — a scenario that violates our physical understanding of how the universe works. Is information really being destroyed or is it somehow being conserved in a way don’t yet understand?
A recent development to the last few decades of debate (involving Hawking and other key physicists) came in 2012 when physicists led by Joseph Polchinski of the University of California in Santa Barbara published their research on the information paradox. If indeed black holes do not destroy information, there must be a raging inferno just inside the black hole’s event horizon called a “firewall.”
Earlier this year, Hawking stepped in arguing that the firewall is not needed and advocated a “chaos wall” that instead jumbles up the information (thereby not violating quantum rules) and varies the location of the event horizon depending on the information that is falling in. In this scenario, argued Hawking, an event horizon (in its classical sense) does not exist — it should be replaced by an “apparent horizon.”
This certainly isn’t a “win” for Hawking or anyone else, it’s just another idea that has been thrown into the pot in an effort to find some balance between apparently conflicting theories that govern information getting consumed by a black hole.
But say if this whole thing has been overcomplicated? Perhaps a mechanism has been overlooked? This is where Adami’s stimulated emission of radiation idea comes in.
“If you throw information at a black hole, just before it is swallowed, the black hole first makes a copy that is left outside. This copying mechanism was discovered by Albert Einstein in 1917, and without it, physics cannot be consistent,” said Adami in a news release.
“In my view Chris Adami has correctly identified the solution to the so-called black hole information paradox,” said Paul Davies, theoretical physicist at Arizona State University. “Ironically, it has been hiding in plain sight for years.”
As matter falls into a black hole’s event horizon, Adami thinks radiation is generated via stimulated emission, retaining a copy of the in-falling information. This radiation will be distinct from the spontaneous Hawking radiation also being generated.
“Stimulated emission of radiation is precisely the process of copying information: one particle comes in, two leave with the same exact set of quantum numbers,” write Adami and Ver Steeg in their publication.
However, information cannot be copied perfectly in the quantum world (a concept known as the no-cloning theorem), “but it turns out that the spontaneous emission of radiation (the Hawking radiation of the black hole) conveniently prevents perfect cloning by supplying the necessary minimum amount of noise.”
The researchers state that this research doesn’t directly address the information that falls beyond the black hole’s event horizon, however, as stimulated emission would occur at the boundary of the black hole’s event horizon, but it could be a potential answer to the information paradox.
Read more at Discovery News
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