Cold Black Holes in the Harlow-Hayden Approach to Firewalls

Understand

Firewalls are controversial principally because they seem to imply departures from general relativistic expectations in regions of spacetime where the curvature need not be particularly large.

• One of the virtues of the Harlow-Hayden approach to the firewall paradox, concerning the time available for decoding of Hawking radiation emanating from charged AdS black holes, is precisely that it operates in the context of cold black holes, which are not strongly curved outside the event horizon.
• Here we clarify this point.
• The approach is based on ideas borrowed from applications of the AdS/CFT correspondence to the quark-gluon plasma.