Phases of information release during black hole evaporation

Understand

In a recent article, we have shown how quantum fluctuations of the background geometry modify Hawking's density matrix for black hole (BH) radiation.

• Hawking's diagonal matrix picks up small off-diagonal elements whose influence becomes larger with the number of emitted particles.
• We have calculated the "time-of-first-bit", when the first bit of information comes out of the BH, and the "transparency time", when the rate of information release becomes order unity.
• We have found that the transparency time is equal to the "Page time", when the BH has lost half of its initial entropy to the radiation, in agreement with Page's results.