Unitary evolution of an evaporating black hole in canonical quantum gravity
Abstract
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.
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BibTeX
@misc{wang2026unitary,
title = {{Unitary evolution of an evaporating black hole in canonical quantum gravity}},
author = {Sijia Wang and Robert B. Mann and Dong-han Yeom},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.13375},
eprint = {2609.13375},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13375},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Unitary evolution of an evaporating black hole in canonical quantum gravity
AU - Sijia Wang
AU - Robert B. Mann
AU - Dong-han Yeom
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/11
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.13375
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13375
AB - 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.
ER -