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Quantum circuit model of black hole evaporation

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Published 12 November 2018 © 2018 IOP Publishing Ltd
, , Citation Tomoro Tokusumi et al 2018 Class. Quantum Grav. 35 235013 DOI 10.1088/1361-6382/aaeb5a

0264-9381/35/23/235013

Abstract

We consider a quantum circuit model describing the evaporation process of black holes. We specifically examine the behavior of the multipartite entanglement represented by this model, and find that the entanglement structure depends on the black hole mass M and the frequency of the Hawking radiation ω. For sufficiently small values of , the black hole and the radiation system becomes a separable state after the Page time and a firewall-like structure appears. On the contrary, for larger values of , the entanglement between the black hole and the radiation is not lost. These behaviors imply that owing to the monogamy property of the multipartite entanglement, low frequency modes of the Hawking radiation destroy the quantum correlation between the black hole and the emitted Hawking radiation.

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1. Introduction

By investigating the quantum field in black hole spacetimes, Hawking predicted that the black hole spontaneously creates entangled particle pairs in the vicinity of the black hole horizon [1]. One particle of the created pair is thermally radiated away to the spatially far region, and the other particle with negative energy falls into the black hole. As the result, the horizon shrinks and the black hole evaporates. In 1976, Hawking pointed out that the information paradox exists in the evaporation process of the black hole [2]. Assuming that the initial state of the black hole is pure and keeping in mind that the thermal radiation is expressed as the mixed state such as the Gibbs state, it turns out that the black hole becomes a mixed state as the evaporation proceeds. However, in theories such as the quantum mechanics, the quantum field theory and the string theory, time evolution is unitary. Thus a pure state evolves with unitary operators and the state remains as a pure state after the evaporation. Consequently, evaporation process of the black hole seems to be inconsistent with the quantum theory.

This inconsistency is also shown by considering the entanglement. The amount of the entanglement between systems A and B can be evaluated by the von Neumann entropy of the reduced density operator $ \newcommand{\Tr}{{\rm Tr}} S_{\rm A} = -\Tr \rho_{\rm A} \log \rho_{\rm A}$ . The von Neumann entropy $ S_{\rm A} $ is zero if and only if the system A is in pure state. In other words, by measuring the amount of entanglement, we can investigate the presence or absence of information paradox because the existence of entanglement is connected to mixedness of the considering system. According to Hawking's calculation, the amount of the entanglement between a particle falling into the black hole and a particle radiated away is zero at the initial stage of evaporation and monotonically increases as the evaporation proceeds. In other words, particles radiated away from the black hole are in pure states at the beginning, then become mixed after evaporation completes. This is why Hawking concluded the information paradox exists.

For this paradox to be solved, the von Neumann entropy should begin to decrease in the middle stage of the evaporation and finally it must become zero. Assuming that the black hole and the Hawking radiation are in a random state and the dynamics of the black hole is chaotic, Page showed that the von Neumann entropy of the Hawking radiation increases from zero, and it has a maximum value at the middle stage of the evaporation and then decreases monotonously. This behavior of the von Neuman entropy is called the Page curve [3, 4] and the time attaining the maximum of the entropy is called the Page time. It is believed that the Page curve represents the general feature of the evaporation process of the black hole and the information of the black hole is carried away by the Hawking radiation.

In studies of AdS/CFT correspondences [5], it is partially shown that the information paradox of the black hole evaporation does not exist if the assumption of the black hole complementarity [6] is imposed:

  • Postulate 1:  
    The process of formation and evaporation of a black hole, as viewed by a distant observer, can be described entirely within the context of standard quantum theory. In particular, there exists an unitary S-matrix which describes the evolution from infalling matter to outgoing Hawking-like radiation.
  • Postulate 2:  
    Outside the stretched horizon of a massive black hole, physics can be described to good approximation by a set of semi-classical field equations.
  • Postulate 3:  
    To a distant observer, a black hole appears to be a quantum system with discrete energy levels. The dimension of the states of a black hole with mass M is the exponential of the Bekenstein–Hawking entropy
    Equation (1)
    where $\mathcal{A}$ is the surface area of the black hole.

Hence, it is widely believed that there is no information paradox with these assumptions, and a consistent evaporation process occurs in the quantum theory. However, considering the black hole after the Page time, Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski and Sully (AMPS) [7] argued that the postulates of the black hole complementarity are still inconsistent and the following postulate should be added:

  • Postulate 4:  
    A freely falling observer experiences nothing out of the ordinary when crossing the horizon.

To make these four postulates consistent, as the most conservative solution, an observer falling through the horizon burns out before it passes through. Therefore, AMPS proposed that the horizon is covered by a firewall. The 'monogamy' relation which is the property of multipartite entanglement plays an important role to show this inconsistency. The monogamy relation states that one system can not entangle with any other system when it is already entangled strongly with another system. Let us divide a system of the evaporation process into three subsystems as follows: $\mathsf{ER}$ (early radiation) is a previously emitted Hawking particle, $\mathsf{JR}$ is a Hawking particle just emitted to exterior, $\mathsf{BH}$ is a partner of the Hawking radiation just created and falls into the black hole. After the Page time (when the Page curve is decreasing), $\mathsf{JR}$ is entangled strongly with $\mathsf{ER}$ due to Page's theorem, and $\mathsf{JR}$ is also entangled with $\mathsf{BH}$ due to purity of the Hawking radiation. Owing to the postulate 4, there is no drama at the black hole horizon, so there must be very strong entanglement between $\mathsf{JR}$ and $\mathsf{BH}$ . If the monogamy relation holds, these appears inconsistency. In order to resolve this inconsistency, the firewall must be introduced to cut the entanglement between $\mathsf{JR}$ and $\mathsf{BH}$ .

To justify the existence of the firewall, it is important to investigate the feature of the multipartite entanglement between the radiated Hawking particles and the particles falling to the black hole. In particular, it is necessary to show whether entanglement is really broken or not. However, it is not easy to evaluate multipartite entanglement in the context of the quantum field theory and there are several works investigating more general quantum information structure by modeling the evaporation process of black holes with qubit systems [812]. A burning paper model is well known as a physical model to explain the Page curve [8]. When a paper is burning, photons are emitted from the surface of the paper. The photon can be entangled with the spin of atoms composing the paper. The entanglement entropy between photons and the paper monotonically increases at the beginning. Then, atoms entangled with photon also become ash and are emitted to the outside and the entanglement entropy may start to decrease at a certain time. When all the paper burns out, ash is released and the entanglement entropy becomes zero. Due to the very complex interaction of the atom with the emitted photons during the burning process, the paper's information is fully encoded into radiated photons and ashes. Although the burning paper model is adequate to explain the Page curve, it has no horizon structure. This is because atoms constituting the paper are discharged to the outside in the form of ashes. Since the horizon is an important structure of spacetimes to characterize the black hole and its size characterizes strength of the entanglement between created Hawking pairs, this difference is unacceptable to investigate the evaporation of the black hole using a toy models with qubits.

Qubit models have been applied to various evaporation scenarios. Hwang et al [11] investigated a qubit model from the viewpoint of the remnant scenarios which are based on a different postulate from AMPS's one, and revealed restrictions of various scenarios of remnant picture. In the research by Luo et al [12], properties of multipartite entanglement in the evaporation process were investigated. During the entire history of evaporation, they found entanglement between $\mathsf{BH}$ and $\mathsf{JR}$ differs from AMPS's expectation and they pointed out the firewall may not be necessary to resolve the information loss problem. However, the time evolution of evaporation in their model is different from that of the Hawking radiation.

In this paper, we propose a quantum circuit model with qubits representing the Hawking radiation with the horizon structure, and investigate behavior of the multipartite entanglement. We aim to discuss emergence of the firewall in our model. The structure of this paper is as follows. In section 2 we introduce our quantum circuit model representing the black hole evaporation. In section 3, we present results of numerical simulation of our model. In section 4, we analytically obtain the state after the Page time and investigate the mutual information and the negativity between the black hole and the Hawking radiation. Section 5 is devoted to summary and discussion.

2. Quantum circuit model

We introduce our quantum circuit model of the black hole evaporation.

2.1. Setup

We describe the Hawking radiation using qubits in our model. A qubit has two distinct internal states $ \renewcommand{\ket}[1]{|#1\rangle} \ket{0}$ and $ \renewcommand{\ket}[1]{|#1\rangle} \ket{1} $ . In order to formulate the black hole evaporation, we separate the Hilbert space of the total system to that of the black hole, the Hawking radiation and the Hawking radiation that had been radiated previously. Hence, prepare the Hilbert space of black hole ($\mathsf{BH}$ ), just radiation ($\mathsf{JR}$ ), early radiation ($\mathsf{ER}$ ) (figure 1)

Equation (2)
Figure 1.

Figure 1. Defition of $\mathsf{BH}$ , $\mathsf{JR}$ and $\mathsf{ER}$ in our model.

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Here, we regard the state $ \renewcommand{\ket}[1]{|#1\rangle} \ket{0} $ of $\mathsf{JR}$ and $\mathsf{ER}$ as the 'vacuum state' with no particles.

We treat particles in $\mathsf{BH}$ , that are paired with the emitted Hawking particles and fall into the black hole, constitute the black hole's degrees of freedom. This is because particles falling into the black hole can be regarded as a part of the black hole owing to the black hole complementary postulate 4.

2.2. Evaporation

Particles come out from the black hole in the evaporation process. For example, a particle in $\mathsf{JR}$ will belong to $\mathsf{ER}$ at the next time step. This process can be realized using the SWAP operation, which exchanges inputted two qubits and is represented by the unitary quantum gate shown in figure 2.

Figure 2.

Figure 2. The SWAP gate.

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In the evaporation process, the black hole shrinks by emitting particles and finally disappears. Furthermore, the information of the black hole is transferred to radiated particles. Qubits in $\mathsf{BH}$ gradually change to $ \renewcommand{\ket}[1]{|#1\rangle} \ket{0}$ state during the evaporation process. When the evaporation finishes and the black hole disappears completely, all the qubits in $\mathsf{BH}$ become $ \renewcommand{\ket}[1]{|#1\rangle} \ket{0}$ state. On the other hand, at the initial stage of evaporation, most of the radiated particles are in $ \renewcommand{\ket}[1]{|#1\rangle} \ket{0}$ state (no particles). Thus, radiated particles state will becomes very complicated because information of the black hole is carried away by the radiated particles. We expect that evaporation can be modeled by swapping the information (qubit) of the black hole with a part of radiation's degrees of freedom. In our model, the SWAP are performed twice between $\mathsf{BH}$ and $\mathsf{JR}$ , and between $\mathsf{JR}$ and $\mathsf{ER}$ .

As a demonstration, we look at the case of the 5 qubit total system and show how the SWAP procedure transfer the information of $\mathsf{BH}$ to radiations. The total system is

Equation (3)

with $|\textsf{BH}|=2^2$ (2 qubit), $|\textsf{JR}|=2^1$ (1 qubit), $|\textsf{ER}|=2^2$ (2 qubit). The initial state of each subsystem is assumed to be

Equation (4)

and the initial total state $ \renewcommand{\ket}[1]{|#1\rangle} \ket{\psi_0}$ is

Equation (5)

Although the Page curve is the average of entanglement entropy, we focus here on a specific state and compute the non-averaged entanglement entropy. The quantum circuit we introduce is shown in figure 3.

Figure 3.

Figure 3. The SWAP circuit for 5 qubit system.

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Let us follow the time steps realized by this circuit.

$\mathsf{At~time~step~1:}$

  • 1.  
    Apply the SWAP between the first qubit of $\mathsf{BH}$ and $\mathsf{JR}$ ,
    Equation (6)
  • 2.  
    Apply the SWAP between $\mathsf{JR}$ and the first qubit of $\mathsf{ER}$ ,
    Equation (7)

$\mathsf{At~time~step~2:}$

  • 1.  
    Apply the SWAP between the second qubit of $\mathsf{BH}$ and $\mathsf{JR}$ ,
    Equation (8)
  • 2.  
    Apply the SWAP between $\mathsf{JR}$ and the second qubit of $\mathsf{ER}$ ,
    Equation (9)

To check this process reflects the property of evaporating models, we compute the von Neumann entropy of radiations $\mathsf{R}:=\mathsf{JR}\, \cup\, \mathsf{ER}$ , $ \newcommand{\Tr}{{\rm Tr}} S_\textsf{R} = - \Tr \rho_\textsf{R} \log_2 \rho_\textsf{R}$ at each step of the SWAP (figure 4).

Figure 4.

Figure 4. The Page curve obtained by the SWAP circuit in figure 3.

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The typical shape of the Page curve is obtained and the information of $\mathsf{BH}$ is transferred to the radiation by the SWAP operation. The effective size of $\mathsf{BH}$ 's Hilbert space at step n is defined by the amount of information

Equation (10)

where $|\textsf{BH}|$ is the dimension of $\mathsf{BH}$ 's Hilbert space determined by the number of qubits. Particles are radiated from $\mathsf{BH}$ by the first SWAP at each step. Thus, this quantum circuit does not have the black hole horizon and the entanglement structure of this circuit is determined only by the $\mathsf{BH}$ initial state. Qubits in $\mathsf{BH}$ are entangled with each other at the initial step. Then, a part of entangled qubit is moved to become $\mathsf{JR}$ and the entanglement between $\mathsf{BH}$ and $\mathsf{R}$ increase. However, the entanglement of the Hawking radiation is originated from the entangled particle pairs created in the vicinity of the black hole horizon and this SWAP circuit is the model of evaporation process without the horizon.

2.3. Hawking radiation

The quantum state of the Hawking radiation is expressed as $ \renewcommand{\ket}[1]{|#1\rangle} \prod\nolimits_{i}\sum\nolimits_{n_i=0}^\infty {\rm e}^{-n_i\beta \omega_i/2} \ket{n_i}_\textsf{BH}\otimes\ket{n_i}_\textsf{JR}$ where $\beta=8\pi M$ is the inverse temperature of the black hole and $ \omega $ is the frequency of the radiation [1]. The state $ \renewcommand{\ket}[1]{|#1\rangle} \ket{n_i}_\textsf{BH}\otimes\ket{n_i}_\textsf{JR}$ represents pairs of the Hawking particles. For $M\omega\gg 0.1 $ , the state is almost same as the vacuum state without particle excitation and for $ M\omega < 0.1$ , $ \renewcommand{\ket}[1]{|#1\rangle} \ket{1}_\textsf{BH}\otimes\ket{1}_\textsf{JR}$ particle state mainly contributes to the total state of the Hawking radiation. Therefore, the essence of the entanglement structure can be revealed even if two or more particle number states are ignored. Thus, we assume the following entangled state represents the Hawking radiation

Equation (11)

From now on, we focus on a specific ω mode of the Hawking radiation. We consider a quantum gate mimicking this state (figure 5). The gate consists of two well-known quantum gates and outputs the entangled state.

Figure 5.

Figure 5. The CNOT-U gate.

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The gate of the right part in the circuit is an unitary gate acting on two qubit called the CNOT gate and works as $ \renewcommand{\ket}[1]{|#1\rangle} \ket{x} \ket{y} \to \ket{x} \ket{x\oplus y}$ . The gate U in the left part is an unitary gate acting on a single qubit. In terms of the matrix representation, it is expressed as

Equation (12)

where γ is the squeezing parameter. For $\gamma = \pi/4$ , U corresponds to the Hadamard gate H, and the CNOT-U gate will output the maximally entangled EPR state. The gate in figure 5 can output an entangled state and the amount of entanglement depends on the parameter $ \gamma$ .

The strength of the entanglement between the created Hawking particle pairs is determined by the mass of the black hole at the considering time step and we must determine the relation between the parameter $ \gamma $ and the black hole mass. For this purpose, we consider the correspondence between the dimension of the $\mathsf{BH}$ Hilbert space ($\mathsf{BH}$ qubit number) and the black hole mass M. From the formula of the Bekenstein–Hawking entropy (1)

Equation (13)

we have

Equation (14)

Note that $ | \textsf{BH}_n^{\rm eff} | $ is just the effective size of $\mathsf{BH}$ Hilbert space and not the actual number of the $\mathsf{BH}$ states. Using these relations, in the natural unit, we obtain

Equation (15)

With this squeezing parameter $ \gamma_n$ , the CNOT-U gate in figure 5 mimics the the Hawking radiation (11).

We combine the SWAP gate and the CNOT-U gate to construct a model of the evaporation process of the Hawking radiation. We have already confirmed that the initial state of $\mathsf{BH}$ is transferred to $\mathsf{JR}$ and $\mathsf{ER}$ by the SWAP circuit and the Page curve is obtained. In the following analysis, we focus on the property of the entanglement caused by the Hawking radiation to clarify how the dynamics of the evaporation is connected with the quantum information process and the firewall argument. Hence, the initial state is assumed to be non-entangled state

Equation (16)

The quantum circuit of our model is presented in figure 6.

Figure 6.

Figure 6. A quantum circuit of the black hole evaporation. The CNOT-U gate acts on $\mathsf{BH}$ and $\mathsf{JR}$ to generate a Hawking particle pair. The SWAP gate acts on two places between $\mathsf{JR}$ and $\mathsf{ER}$ , $\mathsf{BH}$ and $\mathsf{JR}$ to move a qubit of $\mathsf{JR}$ to $\mathsf{ER}$ and move a qubit in $\mathsf{BH}$ to $\mathsf{JR}$ . We note that the SWAP step is just after creation of the Hawking pair, so particles do not directly escape from $\mathsf{BH}$ to $\mathsf{JR}$ .

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In this model, the initial mass of the black hole corresponds to qubit number of $\mathsf{BH}$ . The qubit number can not make so large due to increase of the simulation time. We denote the black hole mass at a certain step n as $M_{n} \omega$ . Because $M_n\propto \sqrt{\log_2 |\textsf{BH}_n|}$ , the black hole mass at arbitrary step n is

Equation (17)

where $M_{\rm init}$ is the initial mass of the black hole and $N_\textsf{BH}$ is the qubit number of $\mathsf{BH}$ used for analysis. The only parameters contained in this model are the value of $ M_{n} \omega $ and n. In our analysis, we choose n as the step at the Page time.

3. Numerical result

In this section, we will analyze evolution of the state in our circuit model (figure 6) focusing on the entanglement structure. In our analysis, the size of $\mathsf{BH}$ is 6 qubit ($|\textsf{BH}|=2^6, N_\textsf{BH}=6$ ), $\mathsf{JR}$ is 1 qubit ($|\textsf{JR}|=2^1$ ) and $\mathsf{ER}$ is 6 qubit ($|\textsf{ER}|=2^6$ ).

3.1. Page curve

As in section 2.2, we check the amount of information transferred from the $\mathsf{BH}$ to the emitted particles and investigate whether the black hole in our model evaporates. For this purpose, we evaluate the entanglement entropy between $\mathsf{BH}$ and $\mathsf{R}=\mathsf{JR}\, \cup\, \mathsf{ER}$ . The evolution of this quantity provides the Page curve, which is an indicator of the information transfer from $\mathsf{BH}$ to radiation. The result is shown for $ M_4\, \omega = 0.1$ and 0.01 in figure 7. Here, M4 denotes the mass of the black hole at step 4.

Figure 7.

Figure 7. The Page curve of our circuit model.

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For $ M_4 \omega=0.01 $ (small $M_4 \omega$ ), the Page curve has a symmetric shape with respect to the middle point of the whole time steps. On the other hand, for $ M_4 \omega=0.1$ (large $M_4\omega$ ), the entanglement entropy between $\mathsf{BH}$ and $\mathsf{R}$ is smaller compared to the small $M_4\omega$ case during whole period of the evaporation process. For large $M_4\omega$ , the black hole radiates Hawking particles with weak entanglement (see equation (11)). Thus the evaporation process is not random enough as Page assumed. However, our model results in Page curves for both values of $M_4\omega$ because the degree of freedom of $\mathsf{BH}$ decreases as the time step proceeds due to the action of the SWAP gate. The entanglement entropy becomes maximum at step 4 and this time step is the Page time of our model.

3.2. Expectation value of particle number of JR

To examine the evaporation rate of our model, we calculate the expectation value of the emitted particle number. In our model, the Hawking radiation is expressed by the state (11) and this expression results in the expectatin value of the particle number

Equation (18)

Although this distribution is equivalent to that of the Hawking radiation with the fermion field [1], we are treating the bosonic particles and the fermionic distribution is result of our assumption for the state of the Hawking radiation. For the state $ \renewcommand{\ket}[1]{|#1\rangle} \ket{\psi} = \sum\nolimits_{ijk} C_{ijk} \ket{i}_\textsf{BH}\ket{j}_\textsf{JR}\ket{k}_\textsf{ER}$ , the expectation value of the particle number of $\mathsf{JR}$ is expressed as

Equation (19)

We checked these formulas for $ M_4 \omega =1, ~0.1, ~0.01, ~0.001$ (figure 8). As the black hole evaporates, the mass decreases and the time step advances from right to left. In our model, $\langle n_\textsf{JR} \rangle$ well coincides with the formula (18) except at the last step with $M_4\omega\geqslant 0.1$ . For $M_4\omega\geqslant 0.1$ , $\langle n_\textsf{JR} \rangle<0.3$ and this means the emitted pair of Hawking particles is weakly entangled. On the other hand, for $M_4\omega\leqslant0.01$ , $\langle n_\textsf{JR} \rangle\approx 0.5$ and this means the Hawking pair is nearly maximally entangled.

Figure 8.

Figure 8. The expectation value of the particle number of $\mathsf{JR}$ as a function of $M\omega$ . We plot the particle number from step 1 to step 7. The red dotted line corresponds to equation (18). We assign the value $M\omega=10^{-4}$ to step 7 to represent the particle number at $M\omega=0$ (the last step) in this plot.

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At the last step, the both formula coincides for $ M_4 \omega\leqslant 0.01 $ but differs much for $ M_4 \omega\geqslant 0.1 $ . This disagreement is caused by the different treatment of the Hawking radiation at the last step in our circuit model. In the evaporation process, $M\rightarrow 0$ is realized at the last step of evaporation. On the other hand, in our model, there is no CNOT-U gate at the last step (see figure 6), so sufficient radiation will not be created at the last step. This is the reason why large disagreement appeared at the last step for $M_4\omega\geqslant 0.1$ . However, if the number of qubits is increased and make the interval of the time step sufficiently small, this difference is expected to be reduced.

3.3. Entanglement structure

Let us analyze the entanglement measure in our model. As we have already introduced the entanglement entropy as the measure of entanglement in section 2.2, we introduce here other two measures needed for our analysis. The mutual information of the bipartite system $\rho_{\rm AB}$ is defined as

Equation (20)

This quantity evaluates how the system is close to the product state. If the mutual information is zero, the state is the product state without classical and quantum correlations. The negativity [13, 14] is defined by

Equation (21)

where $\lambda_i^T$ is the eigenvalue of the partially transposed state $\rho^{T_{\rm A}}_{\rm AB}$ . The partial transposition $T_{\rm A}$ for the state $ \renewcommand{\bra}[1]{\langle#1|} \renewcommand{\ket}[1]{|#1\rangle} \rho = \sum C_{ab:a'b'}\ket{a}\bra{a'}\otimes \ket{b}\bra{b'}$ is defined by $ \renewcommand{\bra}[1]{\langle#1|} \renewcommand{\ket}[1]{|#1\rangle} \rho^{T_{\rm A}}:= \sum C_{ab:a'b'}\ket{a'}\bra{a}\otimes \ket{b}\bra{b'}$ . For a separable bipartite state which has only classical correlations, $\lambda_i^T>0$ owing to Peres's partial transpose criterion [15] and we have $\mathcal{N}=0$ . Thus $\mathcal{N}>0$ means the state is non-separable (entangled). The negativity is an entanglement monotone function, and can be used to quantify the entanglement between A and B even if the combined system A$\cup$ B is not pure. $\mathcal{N}>0$ is the necesary and sufficient non-separable condition for $2\otimes2$ and $2\otimes 3$ bipartite quantum systems.

We calculate these entanglement measures between $\mathsf{BH}$ and $\mathsf{JR}$ , $\mathsf{JR}$ and $\mathsf{ER}$ , $\mathsf{ER}$ and $\mathsf{BH}$ for $ M_4\, \omega = 0.1, ~0.01 $ . The result is shown in figure 9. For $ M_4 \omega=0.01 $ , the negativity between $\mathsf{BH}$ and $\mathsf{JR}$ becomes zero at step 5 after the Page time and $\mathsf{BH}$ and $\mathsf{JR}$ are separable. In other words, for the Hawking radiation with sufficiently low frequencies, a structure similar to the firewall appears between $\mathsf{BH}$ and $\mathsf{JR}$ . However, contrary to the original proposed firewall by AMPS, the classical correlations remains in our firewall-like structure and we do not expect high energy phenomena associated to it. On the other hand, for $ M_4 \omega=0.1 $ , the values of mutual information and negativity between $\mathsf{BH}$ and $\mathsf{JR}$ remain nonzero, and $\mathsf{BH}$ and $\mathsf{JR}$ are entangled until the end of the evaporation. For sufficiently small $ M_4 \omega $ , nearly maximally entangled pair of the Hawking particles is created by the CNOT-U gate and the qubit strongly entangled with other qubit goes through the CNOT-U gate again after the Page time. However, due to the limited amount of entanglement between qubits, which is known as the monogamy property of the entanglement, it is impossible to add more entanglement and no entangled pairs can be created when passing through the second CNOT-U gate after the Page time. If this reasoning for small $ M_4 \omega $ is correct, the emergence of the firewall-like structure can be explained.

Figure 9.

Figure 9. Evolution of the mutual information and the negativity. Upper panels: evolution of the mutual information $I(\textsf{BH}\!:\!\textsf{JR})$ and the negativity $\mathcal{N}(\textsf{BH}\!:\!\textsf{JR})$ . For $M_4\omega=0.01$ , after step 5, the negativity becomes zero and the mutual information has very small but non-zero values. This implies the firewall-like structure appears after the Page time. Middle panels: information of emitted radiation, which show how much information is extracted from $\mathsf{BH}$ at each step. Bottom panels: entanglement of $\textsf{BH}\cup\textsf{ER}$ subsystem shows nearly the same behavior as the Page curve.

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4. Analytic evaluation of state after page time

From the results obtained by the numerical calculation, it turned out that the firewall-like structure appears after the Page time if $ M_4 \omega $ is sufficiently small. We intend to explain why our model shows the firewall-like behavior.

4.1. Structure of state around page time

According to our numerical calculation, the firewall-like behavior becomes remarkable as $M_4\omega$ becomes small. To obtain comprehensive understanding of this structure, we analytically evaluate the state around the Page time. We introduce the matrix representation of the U gate and the CNOT gate,

Equation (22)

where $\mathbb{I}_2$ is the $2\times 2$ identity matrix, $ \newcommand{\e}{{\rm e}} X=\left[\begin{array}{@{}cc@{}} 0 & 1 \\ 1 & 0\end{array}\right]$ and

Equation (23)

Then the matrix representation of the CNOT-U gate is

Equation (24)

We prepare $ \renewcommand{\ket}[1]{|#1\rangle} \ket{{{\rm init}}} = \ket{000000}_\textsf{BH}\ket{0}_\textsf{JR}\ket{000000}_\textsf{ER}$ as the initial state and consider the action of the quantum circuit on this state.

Before the Page time: The Page time corresponds to step 4 and the circuit up to just before step 4 is equivalent to the following circuit diagram (figure 10). We rearranged order of qubit and changed the number of labels from those defined in the original circuit in figure 6.

Figure 10.

Figure 10. Quantum circuit before the Page time (before step 4). $ \renewcommand{\ket}[1]{|#1\rangle} \ket{{{\rm squ}}} := \cos \gamma \ket{00}+\sin\gamma \ket{11}$ .

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The state of the total system is

Equation (25)

At step 4: The circuit just before the Page time to step 4 (the Page time) can be drawn as figure 11. Only $\textsf{BH}_1$ , $\textsf{JR}$ and $\textsf{ER}_1$ get involved.

Figure 11.

Figure 11. Quantum circuit from before the Page time to step 4.

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The state at step 4 is obtained as

Equation (26)

In the low frequency limit $M_4\omega\rightarrow 0$ , squeezing parameters are $\gamma_1, \gamma_4\rightarrow \pi/4$ and

Equation (27)

where $ \newcommand{\e}{{\rm e}} H_\textsf{JR}:=\left[\begin{array}{@{}cc@{}} 1 & 1 \\ 1 & -1 \end{array}\right]$ acts on the qubit of $\mathsf{JR}$ . The appeared state $ \renewcommand{\ket}[1]{|#1\rangle} (\ket{000}+\ket{111})/\sqrt{2}$ is the GHZ state, which is the maximally entangled triqubit state. If one qubit in the GHZ state is traced out, the remaining subsystem with two qubits becomes separable. Since an unitary operator acting only on a single qubit does not affect the entanglement structure, $\mathsf{BH}$ and $\mathsf{JR}$ become separable at step 4 in the low frequency limit if $\mathsf{ER}$ is traced out. As we will see, this leads to the firewall-like structure at step 5.

At before step 5: The circuit diagram is figure 12. Qubits pass through the SWAP gate from step 4 to step 5.

Figure 12.

Figure 12. Quantum circuit for step 4 to step $4' =$ before step 5.

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At step 4, one qubit in $\mathsf{BH}$ and two qubits in $\mathsf{JR}$ and $\mathsf{ER}$ are entangled. At just before step 5, one qubit in $\mathsf{BH}$ is $ \renewcommand{\ket}[1]{|#1\rangle} \ket{0}$ state, and one qubit in $\mathsf{JR}$ and two qubit in $\mathsf{ER}$ are entangled.

At step 5: The quantum circuit up to step 5 is shown in figure 13.

Figure 13.

Figure 13. Quantum circuit for step $4'$ to step 5.

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The state at step 5 is obtained as

Equation (28)

where

Equation (29)

4.2. Negativity and mutual information at step 4 and 5

As we have obtain the state at step 4 and step 5, it is possible to investigate the entanglement structure by evaluating the mutual information and the negativity between $\mathsf{BH}$ and $\mathsf{JR}$ .

4.2.1. At step 4.

The reduced density matrix $\rho^4_{\textsf{BH}_1\cup\textsf{JR}}$ at step 4 is

Equation (30)

To obtain the mutual information $I(\textsf{BH}_1\!:\!\textsf{JR})$ , we prepare the reduce states

Equation (31)

Eigenvalues of these states are

Equation (32)

and the mutual information is

Equation (33)

The red line in the left panel of figure 14 shows the mutual information as a function of $M_4\omega$ . It behaves as

Equation (34)
Figure 14.

Figure 14. Left panel: $M_4\omega$ dependence of the mutual information between $\textsf{BH}_1$ and $\mathsf{JR}$ at step 4 and 5. Right panel: $M_4\omega$ dependence of the negativity between $\textsf{BH}_2$ and $\mathsf{JR}$ at step 4 and 5. The negativity becomes zero for $M_4\omega\leqslant 0.041$ at step 5 and $\textsf{BH}_2\!\cup\!\textsf{JR}$ system becomes separable.

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The negativity is obtained using eigenvalues of the partial transposed state $\rho^{4T_\textsf{JR}}_{\textsf{BH}\cup\textsf{JR}}$

Equation (35)

and

Equation (36)

The red line in the right panel of figure 14 shows the negativity as a function of $M_4\omega$ . The negativity at step 4 has a peak at $M_4\omega\approx 0.1$ and behaves as

Equation (37)

As we have mentioned, $ \renewcommand{\ket}[1]{|#1\rangle} \ket{\psi^4}_{\textsf{BH}_1, \textsf{JR}, \textsf{ER}_1}$ becomes the GHZ state for $M_4\omega\rightarrow 0$ . Corresponding to this, the state $\rho^4_{\textsf{BH}_1\cup\textsf{JR}}$ becomes separable in this limit. The von Neuman entropies for this state are $S(\textsf{BH}_1)=S(\textsf{JR})=S(\textsf{BH}_1\!\cup\!\textsf{JR})=1$ (bit). Thus the mutual information has the value 1 (bit), which means $\textsf{BH}_1$ and $\mathsf{JR}$ have the perfect classical correlation.

4.2.2. At step 5.

The reduced density matrix $\rho^5_{\textsf{BH}_2\cup\textsf{JR}}$ is

Equation (38)

where

To obtain the mutual information between $\textsf{BH}_2$ and $\mathsf{JR}$ , we calculate eigenvalues of the states $ \rho_\textsf{JR}, \rho_{\textsf{BH}_2}$ and $\rho_{\textsf{BH}_2\cup\textsf{JR}} $ . Eigenvalues $\lambda_i$ (i  =  $\mathsf{JR}$ , $\textsf{BH}_2$ , $\textsf{BH}_2\!\cup\!\textsf{JR}$ ) are

Equation (39)

The mutual information between $\textsf{BH}_2$ and $\mathsf{JR}$ as a function of $M_4\omega$ is shown in figure 14 (the blue line in the left panel). It behaves as $I\approx (40\pi^2/3)(M_4\omega){}^2$ for $ M_4\omega\ll0.1 $ and $I\rightarrow 0$ for $M_4\omega\rightarrow 0$ limit.

To evaluate the negativity, we obtain the eigenvalues of the partially transposed state $\rho^{T_\textsf{JR}}_{\textsf{BH}_2, \textsf{JR}}$ as

Equation (40)

and the negativity is given by $\mathcal{N}=\left(\sum\nolimits_i|\lambda_i|-1\right)/2$ . The result is shown in the right panel in figure 14 (the blue line). The negativity becomes exactly zero for $M_4\omega\leqslant 0.041$ . Thus, at step 5 (next step to the Page time), our model shows $\textsf{BH}_2$ and $\mathsf{JR}$ become separable for low frequency modes satisfying $M_4\omega < 0.041$ and have only the classical correlation. This separable state corresponds to the firewall. In the $M_4\omega\rightarrow 0$ limit ($\gamma\rightarrow\pi/4$ ), the reduced density matrix at step 5 is

Equation (41)

Thus, $\textsf{BH}_2$ and $\mathsf{JR}$ are in a product state with no classical correlation (random). For $0<M_4\omega\ll 0.041$ , the state is separable with weak classical correlations. The schematic diagram representing the quantum states at step 4 and step 5 is shown in figure 15.

Figure 15.

Figure 15. The state at step 4 and step 5 (at the Page time and next step) in the low frequency limit ($M_4\omega\rightarrow 0$ ).

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Three qubits in $\mathsf{BH}$ , $\mathsf{JR}$ and $\mathsf{ER}$ form the GHZ state at step 4, which is nearly maximally entangled. At step 5, the CNOT-U gate acts on $\mathsf{BH}$ and $\mathsf{JR}$ . However, as $\mathsf{BH}$ and $\mathsf{JR}$ are already maximally entangled with other qubits, and no entanglement can be shared between $\mathsf{BH}$ and $\mathsf{JR}$ by the monogamy property of the multipartite entanglement. This is the reason why the entanglement between $\mathsf{BH}$ and $\mathsf{JR}$ is lost and the firewall-like structure arises for $M_4\omega\leqslant 0.041$ .

5. Summary and discussion

We constructed a quantum circuit model that realizes the evaporation of the black hole. Using the formula of the Bekenstein–Hawking entropy, the black hole mass is introduced to our model. Then, analysis was performed assuming that a single frequency mode passes independently through the quantum circuit. We revealed that the negativity between $\mathsf{BH}$ and $\mathsf{JR}$ becomes zero after the Page time for $M_4\omega\leqslant 0.041$ and the firewall-like structure appears. This separable state has the small non-zero mutual information, which becomes zero in $M_4\omega\rightarrow 0$ limit. On the other hand, for $ M_4 \omega>0.041$ , the entanglement does not become zero and we do not have the firewall-like structure. One notice concerning our model is that it contains the structure of horizon. In the burning paper model, particles' information is released to the outside as the ash, hence it is a model without horizon. In the model introduced in this paper, $\mathsf{BH}$ qubits are discharged to the outside through CNOT-U gate, which squeezes inputted qubits states and mimics the Hawking radiation. This means the effect of the horizon is taken into our model. Another notice is that we assume $ \renewcommand{\ket}[1]{|#1\rangle} \ket{0}_\textsf{BH}$ as the initial state of $\mathsf{BH}$ . It may be possible to adopt the initial state with some excitation of particles determined by temperature of the initial mass of the black hole. However, we expect that such a generalization does not alter the main feature of entanglement obtained in this paper because the non-vacuum weakly entangled initial state of $\mathsf{BH}$ will not change the entanglement structure after the Page time so much.

Related to our investigation in this paper, the result of Luo et al [12] may correspond to the high frequency mode of our model and they found that the firewall is not necessary. However, our conclusion is that by considering low frequency modes, the black hole always shows the firewall behavior after the Page time. AMPS pointed out necessity of some mechanism to affect the function of horizon to keep the theoretical consistency. Our result can be interpreted that the long wavelength mode influences the horizon so as to form the firewall. In particular, for the low frequency mode with $ M_4 \omega\leqslant 0.041$ , the Hawking particles emitted earlier than the Page time influences the function of the horizon after the Page time. They form the GHZ state with newly created Hawking particle pairs. Therefore, $\mathsf{BH}$ and $\mathsf{JR}$ can only possess the classical correlation without entanglement.

The impact of the low frequency mode (soft mode) of quantum fluctuations on the entanglement structure is also discussed in different contexts and different systems. In the paper [16], if the zero-energy soft mode emission is involved with the evaporation process, the entanglement entropy between the black hole and the radiation becomes much larger than the black hole's thermal entropy as opposed to the Page curve prediction. In cosmological situations, soft modes of which wavelength is larger than the Hubble horizon scale, becomes separable and shows the similar entanglement structure to the firewall [17]. It may be interesting to obtain unified understanding of emergence of the separable state from the viewpoint of the horizon structure (geometry) and the monogamy property (entanglement).

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10.1088/1361-6382/aaeb5a