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Information Recovery from Non-Factorized States

Iker Ibarrola Echeverría

Published Jan 30, 2026• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We present a minimal, fully unitary toy model of black hole evaporation in which information recovery emerges from non-factorized global states and observer-dependent access. The model reproduces a Page-like entropy curve for Hawking radiation without invoking fundamental information loss, horizon microstructure, or spacetime geometry at the microscopic level. The result supports the interpretation that the black hole information paradox arises from regime-dependent coarse-graining rather than from a breakdown of quantum unitarity.

DOI
10.5281/zenodo.18436775

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We present a minimal, fully unitary toy model of black hole evaporation in which information recovery emerges from non-factorized global states and observer-dependent access. The model reproduces a Page-like entropy curve for Hawking radiation without invoking fundamental information loss, horizon microstructure, or spacetime geometry at the microscopic level. The result supports the interpretation that the black hole information paradox arises from regime-dependent coarse-graining rather than from a breakdown of quantum unitarity.
Black hole evaporation is one of the most striking phenomena at the interface between gravity and quantum physics. In Hawking's semi-classical treatment, where matter is quantum mechanical and the spacetime is definite and classical, evaporation leads to an apparent loss of unitarity of the overall evolution, and to the so-called black hole information paradox. Here, we go beyond this semi-classical treatment and formulate a toy quantum model of black hole evaporation that allows the black hole to evolve into a superposition of being fully evaporated and not fully evaporated, consistent with the Hawking particles being in a coherent superposition of different energy levels. We model Hawking particle production by the repeated action of quantum-controlled unitaries, generating emission from the quantum black hole and accounting for a quantum coherent back-reaction on the black hole matter state. We show that the probability of full annihilation of the black hole matter increases with time until the black hole is, asymptotically, fully evaporated in every branch of the quantum superposition. We prove that under natural assumptions, this evaporation model is unitary, such that the initial state can in principle be recovered from the final asymptotic state of the radiation.
We investigate quantum correlations between successive steps of black hole evaporation and investigate whether they might resolve the black hole information paradox. ‘Small’ corrections in various models were shown to be unable to restore unitarity. We study a toy qubit model of evaporation that allows small quantum correlations between successive steps and reaffirm previous results. Then, we relax the ‘smallness’ condition and find a nontrivial upper and lower bound on the entanglement entropy change during the evaporation process. This gives a quantitative measure of the size of the correction needed to restore unitarity. We find that these entanglement entropy bounds lead to a significant deviation from the expected Page curve.
The complete evaporation of black holes, as a natural endpoint of Hawking radiation, gives rise to the black hole information paradox, which fundamentally challenges the principles of unitarity and information conservation in quantum mechanics. Although the AdS/CFT correspondence indicates that information is preserved during black hole evaporation, the precise mechanism by which it is recovered from the Hawking radiation remains an open question. To explore a potential resolution, we investigate information transfer in a spin-chain model featuring an effective horizon realized via position-dependent couplings within an XY spin chain. We derive and demonstrate Page curve-like behavior, and analyze the transmission of quantum resources, such as entanglement and coherence, across the effective horizon. Our results show that quantum resources initially localized within an interior subsystem can be transferred to the exterior via particle radiation through the horizon. This study provides a novel perspective from quantum simulation on how information may escape from black holes, thereby contributing to the further understanding of the black hole information paradox.
We propose a framework for understanding the information loss paradox in the context of canonical quantum gravity. We first revisit several approaches to black hole evaporation that do not involve an event horizon. In these models, we assume that each time slice corresponds to a coherent state in the gravitational phase space. Due to this property, the quantum state associated with a given spatial configuration will have a nonzero overlap with another spatial configuration. We show how this property can account for both semi-classical dynamics and unitary time evolution. We introduce an explicit toy model that follows semi-classical time evolution at the coarse-grained level; in addition, its time evolution is unitary at the fine-grained level. The only price that one must pay is the violation of the entropy bound; we discuss reasons why this may be justifiable.
Abstract The black hole information paradox (Hawking, 19741976) poses a fundamental conict: quantum mechanics requires unitary evolution (information is preserved), while black hole evaporation via Hawking radiation appears to destroy information (the radiation is thermal, carrying no information about the in-fallen state). After fty years of debate, the paradox remains unresolvedHawking conceded it in 2004 [3] but no complete mechanism has been identied. ˆ We resolve the paradox by identifying its source: confusing Ω with Πext[Ω]. Information is never destroyed. Ω-conservation (Noether, P2) guarantees this. What is destroyed at the event horizon is not the information but the exterior ˆ observer's projection operator : Πext becomes inapplicable inside the horizon. The ˆ ˆ information encoded in the in-fallen matter passes from Πext[Ω] to Πint[Ω]two projections of the same Ω = 1 that agree in total but disagree in local accessibility. Hawking radiation is the κ→0 leakage of Ω-entanglement across the projection boundary. The Page curve [4]entanglement entropy rising and then falling as the black hole evaporatesfollows directly from Ω-conservation without invoking island formulas [8, 9] or specic stringy mechanisms. The paradox is not a paradox. It is a projection error.
Abstract Black-hole evaporation can be unitary only if Hawking's thermal spectrum is a coarse view of an underlying pure quantum process. Island and replica-wormhole calculations recover the Page curve but do not generally provide the amplitudes mapping a specified black-hole microstate to outgoing quanta. Here we construct such a state-resolved channel for an area-law quantum memory in matrix black-hole quantum mechanics. An exact symmetry separates the fermionic state into a geometric factor that controls emission and a protected factor untouched by the full real- and imaginary-time matrix and link dynamics. We prove that this memory occurs in every representation sector, enumerate all sectors through rank ten, and exhibit a self-complementary sector whose entropy scales with horizon area. When the matrix rank decreases, an exact branching isometry transfers the memory into daughter-hole and radiation degrees of freedom. Combining this isometry with the model's monopole-tunnelling weights gives every encoded state the same Hawking-thermal branch probabilities while its conditional radiation remains pure and microstate dependent. Finite-rank simulations show Page-like transfer and near-unit decoding; dephasing leaves the branch probabilities unchanged but erases recovery. The result provides an explicit amplitude-level mechanism by which Hawking thermality and unitary information transfer coexist in one microscopic model.