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arXiv:2609.28962

Blast freezing a black hole

Shoaib Akhtar, Xiao-Liang Qi

Published Sep 24, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

What happens to information carried through an evaporating black-hole horizon? We introduce a solvable model of evaporation built from coupled Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev systems, in which an initially two-sided black hole is coupled at a finite time to a larger, colder bath. Evaporation is rapid in this model, so we refer to the process as ``blast freezing'' of a black hole. In an appropriate large-$N$ and large-$p$ limit, the two-point functions and certain four-point probes can be computed analytically. Using the two-point functions as input to a generalized HKLL reconstruction, we obtain the emergent bulk geometry of the evaporation process. We then track the information carried by an infalling particle using operator size and Renyi-2 mutual information, showing how it is preserved in nonlocal many-body degrees of freedom after the blast-freezing transition.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2609.28962

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What happens to information carried through an evaporating black-hole horizon? We introduce a solvable model of evaporation built from coupled Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev systems, in which an initially two-sided black hole is coupled at a finite time to a larger, colder bath. Evaporation is rapid in this model, so we refer to the process as ``blast freezing'' of a black hole. In an appropriate large-NNN and large-ppp limit, the two-point functions and certain four-point probes can be computed analytically. Using the two-point functions as input to a generalized HKLL reconstruction, we obtain the emergent bulk geometry of the evaporation process. We then track the information carried by an infalling particle using operator size and Renyi-2 mutual information, showing how it is preserved in nonlocal many-body degrees of freedom after the blast-freezing transition.
Abstract We present a microscopic model of black hole (BH) ‘evaporation’ in asymptotically AdS2 spacetimes dual to the low energy sector of the SYK model. To describe evaporation, the SYK model is coupled to a bath comprising of Nf free scalar fields Φi. We consider a linear combination of couplings of the form OSY K(t)∑iΦi(0, t), where OSY K involves products of the Kourkoulou-Maldacena operator iJ/N∑k=1N/2sk′ψ2k−1(t)ψ2k(t) iJ/N{\sum}_{k=1}^{N/2}{s}_k^{\prime }{\psi}_{2k-1}(t){\psi}_{2k}(t) iJ/N∑k=1N/2​sk′​ψ2k−1​(t)ψ2k​(t) iJ / N ∑ k = 1 N / 2 s k ′ ψ 2 k − 1 t ψ 2 k t specified by a spin vector s′. We discuss the time evolution of a product of (i) a pure state of the SYK system, namely a BH microstate characterized by a spin vector s and an effective BH temperature TBH, and (ii) a Calabrese-Cardy state of the bath characterized by an effective temperature Tbath. We take Tbath ≪ TBH, and TBH much lower than the characteristic UV scale J of the SYK model, allowing a description in terms of the time reparameterization mode. Tracing over the bath degrees of freedom leads to a Feynman-Vernon type effective action for the SYK model, which we study in the low energy limit. The leading large N behaviour of the time reparameterization mode is found, as well as the O(1/N) O\left(1/\sqrt{N}\right) O(1/N​) O 1 / N fluctuations. The latter are characterized by a non-Markovian non-linear stochastic differential equation with non-local Gaussian noise. In a restricted range of couplings, we find two classes of solutions which asymptotically approach (a) a BH at a lower temperature, and (b) a horizonless geometry. We identify these with partial and complete BH evaporation, respectively. Importantly, the asymptotic solution in both cases involves the scalar product of the spin vectors s.s′, which carries some information about the initial state. By repeating the dynamical process O(N2) times with different choices of the spin vector s′, one can in principle reconstruct the initial BH microstate.
We study the fidelity of information retrieval in the black hole final state model by taking into account the interactions between the collapsing matter and the infalling Hawking radiation inside the event horizon . By utilizing a scrambling unitary operator to model these interactions, our direct calculations suggest that the information is almost lost during the process of black hole evaporation. We then proceed to employ the Yoshida-Kitaev decoding strategy for information retrieval. Although we observe a finite improvement in decoding fidelity, it does not reach unity. This indicates that the issue of unitarity in black hole evaporation may not be fully resolved within the framework of the final state model.
Abstract In this note, following [1–3], we introduce and study various holographic systems which can describe evaporating black holes. The systems we consider are boundary conformal field theories for which the number of local degrees of freedom on the boundary (cbdy) is large compared to the number of local degrees of freedom in the bulk CFT (cbulk). We consider states where the boundary degrees of freedom on their own would describe an equilibrium black hole, but the coupling to the bulk CFT degrees of freedom allows this black hole to evaporate. The Page time for the black hole is controlled by the ratio cbdy/cbulk. Using both holographic calculations and direct CFT calculations, we study the evolution of the entanglement entropy for the subset of the radiation system (i.e. the bulk CFT) at a distance d > a from the boundary. We find that the entanglement entropy for this subsystem increases until time a + tPage and then undergoes a phase transition after which the entanglement wedge of the radiation system includes the black hole interior. Remarkably, this occurs even if the radiation system is initially at the same temperature as the black hole so that the two are in thermal equilibrium. In this case, even though the black hole does not lose energy, it “radiates” information through interaction with the radiation system until the radiation system contains enough information to reconstruct the black hole interior.
Abstract We present an analytical formulation of the recent one-shot decoupling model of Bràdler and Adami (2015 arXiv: 1505.0284 ) and compute the resulting ‘Page information’ curves, for the reduced density matrices for the evaporating black hole (BH) internal degrees of freedom, and emitted Hawking radiation pairs entangled across the horizon. We argue that BH evaporation/particle production has a very close analogy to the laboratory process of spontaneous parametric down conversion, when the pump is allowed to deplete.
Abstract We construct three models to describe the scenario where two eternal black holes are separated by a flat space, and can eventually be entangled by exchanging radiation. In the doubly holographic setup, we compute the entanglement entropy and mutual information among subsystems and obtain the dynamic phase structure of the entanglement. The formation of entanglement between these two black holes is delayed by the space which the radiation must travel through. If the black holes exchange sufficient Hawking modes, the final state is characterized by a connected entanglement wedge; otherwise, the final entanglement wedge contains two separate islands. In the former case, the entanglement wedge of the black holes forms at the time scale proportional to the size of the flat space between them. While in both cases, the unitarity of the evolution is preserved. When the sizes of the black holes are not equal, we observe a loss of entanglement between the smaller black hole and the radiation at late times. On the field theory side, we consider two Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) clusters coupled to a Majorana chain, which resemble two black holes connected by a radiation region. We numerically compute the same entanglement measures and obtain similar phase structures as the bulk results. In general, a time delay of the entanglement between the SYK clusters is found in cases with a long Majorana chain. In particular, when the SYK clusters are different in size, similar entanglement loss between the smaller SYK cluster and the Majorana chain is observed. Finally, we investigate a chain model composed of EPR clusters with particles exchanging between neighboring clusters and reproduce the features of entanglement observed in the previous models.
We present a four-qubit quantum circuit model of black hole evaporation with a controlled violation of semi-causality, understood as the condition that information may fall into the black hole but cannot propagate back across the horizon. Building on Broda's semi-causal evaporation circuit, we introduce a controlled-unitary gate CU(σ)\mathrm{CU}(σ)CU(σ) that allows tunable information leakage from the interior to the exterior while preserving global unitarity. We compute the single-qubit reduced entropies, together with the mutual information and entanglement negativity for the BH-GR and IN-OUT bipartitions, at each discrete time step. For σ=0σ=0σ=0, the model reproduces Broda's Page-like entropy evolution with complete late-time purification. For any σ>0σ>0σ>0, however, nonzero residual single-qubit entropies and persistent late-time entanglement remain, indicating incomplete purification of the outgoing radiation despite the global unitary evolution. In the small-σσσ regime, the residual entropy exhibits a characteristic −σ2ln⁡σ2-σ^{2}\lnσ^{2}−σ2lnσ2 scaling that bears qualitative similarity to logarithmic entropy corrections in generalized uncertainty principle inspired evaporation scenarios. For larger values of σσσ, the persistence of finite residual entropy invites comparison with remnant-like endpoint configurations in regular or extremal black hole models. Our results show how controlled departures from the semi-causal limit modify information recovery in a minimal analytically tractable model of black hole evaporation.