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arXiv:2610.10769

Reconstruction of Black Hole Islands from Hawking Radiation via the Algebraic Petz Map

Niloofar Vardian

hep-thgr-qcquant-phSubmitted Oct 7, 2026• Announced Oct 9, 2026• 0 citations• Revised Oct 27, 2026 (v2)
v1 · Oct 7, 2026v2 · Oct 27, 2026
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Abstract

The island proposal guarantees a unitary Page curve for evaporating black holes, implying that operators deep behind the horizon must be fully reconstructable from asymptotic Hawking radiation. However, because the interior is causally disconnected and highly dynamical, standard entanglement wedge reconstruction methods, relying on global isometries or continuous modular flow, fail to provide this mapping. We resolve this by constructing a protocol for island reconstruction using the algebraic Petz map. By using modular theory, we reflect island operators into the accessible complement, transport them to the boundary, and map them into the radiation algebra. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this purely algebraic derivation naturally yields the structure of Papadodimas-Raju mirror operators. This framework provides a rigorous operational dictionary for the island formula, proving that information trapped inside a black hole can be decoded.

Comments
v2: Typos corrected, references added, comments added to Sections II and III, and acknowledgments updated

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The island proposal guarantees a unitary Page curve for evaporating black holes, implying that operators deep behind the horizon must be fully reconstructable from asymptotic Hawking radiation. However, because the interior is causally disconnected and highly dynamical, standard entanglement wedge reconstruction methods, relying on global isometries or continuous modular flow, fail to provide this mapping. We resolve this by constructing a protocol for island reconstruction using the algebraic Petz map. By using modular theory, we reflect island operators into the accessible complement, transport them to the boundary, and map them into the radiation algebra. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this purely algebraic derivation naturally yields the structure of Papadodimas-Raju mirror operators. This framework provides a rigorous operational dictionary for the island formula, proving that information trapped inside a black hole can be decoded.
The black hole information paradox is one of the important questions of physics in the last few decades. We study the reconstruction of the bulk operators in AdS/CFT when the geometry contains a black hole. The black hole exterior can be mapped to the CFT via a very simple Petz map which coincides with the HKLL map reconstruction of the black hole exterior. For the interior modes of the bulk theory, using the definition of the Petz recovery channel in modular theory, we can find the mapping from the black hole interior to the dual boundary theory. In the case of the evaporating black hole, it is expected that the interior modes map to some operators that have support only on the bath system, the cavity that absorbs the Hawking radiation. The most important observation that we have here is that in the case that we have a typical black hole microstate in the bulk, the CFT dual of the interior modes that we can find using the Petz recovery channel are exactly the operators that so-called "mirror operator " in the Papadodimas-Raju proposal. The main idea of the PR proposal is to focus on a code subspace of the CFT theory, which is created by acting with a small algebra on the corresponding pure state and then fnd the CFT description of the interior operator in a state-dependent manner just in the chosen code subs. Therefore, we can interpret Papadodimas- Raju proposal as an example of the Petz map reconstruction. It may help us answer some open questions about their procedure.
We examine the possibility of reconstructing quantum information emitted by an evaporating black hole using modular operator theory within an algebraic framework. This approach is based on the entanglement structure described by Tomita-Takesaki theory, without relying on a specific model of quantum gravity. In comparison with other solutions to the black hole information paradox (notably the "islands" approach and quantum errorcorrecting codes), our proposal aims to characterize the approximate localizability of interior black hole operators within the Hawking radiation. We also discuss conceptual limitations of this method and potential implementations via tensor networks.
We show that the area operator of a quantum extremal surface can be reconstructed directly from boundary dynamics without reference to bulk geometry. Our approach combines the operator-algebra quantum error-correction (OAQEC) structure of AdS/CFT with modular Krylov complexity. Using Lanczos coefficients of boundary modular dynamics, we extract the spectrum of the modular Hamiltonian restricted to the algebra of the entanglement wedge and isolate its central contribution, which is identified with the area operator. The construction is purely boundary-based and applies to superpositions of semiclassical geometries as well. As an application, we diagnose island formation and the Page transition in evaporating black holes using boundary modular evolution alone, bypassing any bulk extremization. More broadly, our results establish modular Krylov complexity as a concrete and computable probe of emergent spacetime geometry, providing a new route to accessing black hole interiors from boundary quantum dynamics.
A bstract Recent works have suggested that the entanglement wedge of Hawking radiation coming from an AdS black hole will include an island inside the black hole interior after the Page time. In this paper, we propose a concrete way to extract the information from the island by acting only on the radiation degrees of freedom, building on the equivalence between the boundary and bulk modular flow. We consider examples with black holes in JT gravity coupled to baths. In the case that the bulk conformal fields contain free massless fermion field, we provide explicit bulk picture of the information extraction process, where we find that one can almost pull out an operator from the island to the bath with modular flow.
Abstract We construct a holographic map that takes the semi-classical state of an evaporating black hole and its Hawking radiation to a microscopic model that reflects the scrambling dynamics of the black hole. The microscopic model is given by a nested sequence of random unitaries, each one implementing a scrambling time step of the black hole evolution. Differently from other models, energy conservation and the thermal nature of the Hawking radiation are taken into account. We show that the QES formula follows for the entropy of multiple subsets of the radiation and black hole. We further show that a version of entanglement wedge reconstruction can be proved by computing suitable trace norms and quantum fidelities involving the action of a unitary on a subset of Hawking partners. If the Hawking partner is in an island, its unitary can be reconstructed by a unitary on the radiation. We also adopt a similar setup and analyse reconstruction of unitaries acting on an infalling system.
The Island Formula for Quantum Extremal Surfaces of large AdS black holes, which are made to evaporate by coupling the CFT of the AdS/CFT correspondence to an external system, demonstrates that the space time picture can reproduce the quantum mechanically required Page curve of the CFT/bath system if a region in the interior of the black hole has become entangled with the external radiation by the Page time. In an effective quantum field theory (EFT) description in ``nice slice" coordinates, this appears to imply paradoxical entanglement between degrees of freedom that have been causally disconnected since long before the Page time. We will give two arguments that all of the quantum information in the island is in fact concentrated in a tiny space-like portion of the island very close to the black hole horizon at the Page time. The first applies the covariant entropy bound\cite{fsb} (CEB) to the causal diamonds of geodesics originating on the space-like region that becomes the island, but on a time slice just before the Page time. All points on the island except those in a stretched horizon region very close to the horizon have entropy bounds that are tiny fractions of the black hole entropy. The second argument uses standard quantum statistical mechanics combined with the tensor network renormalization group regularization of CFT to argue that the wave function of a typical pure state in the microcanonical evaporating black hole always has most of its probability concentrated in a small range of wavelengths corresponding to a small range of radii in the dual tensor network/AdS slice.