We argue that the following three statements cannot all be true: (i) Hawking radiation is in a pure state, (ii) the information carried by the radiation is emitted from the region near the horizon, with low energy effective field theory valid beyond some microscopic distance from the horizon, and (iii) the infalling observer encounters nothing unusual at the horizon. Perhaps the most conservative resolution is that the infalling observer burns up at the horizon. Alternatives would seem to require novel dynamics that nevertheless cause notable violations of semiclassical physics at macroscopic distances from the horizon.

Bulk quantum fields are often said to contribute to the generalized entropy A 4G N`S bulk only at Op1q. Nonetheless, in the context of evaporating black holes, Op1{G N q gradients in S bulk can arise due to large boosts, introducing a quantum extremal surface far from any classical extremal surface. We examine the effect of such bulk quantum effects on quantum extremal surfaces (QESs) and the resulting entanglement wedge in a simple two-boundary 2d bulk system defined by Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity coupled to a 1+1 CFT. Turning on a coupling between one boundary and a further external auxiliary system which functions as a heat sink allows a two-sided otherwise-eternal black hole to evaporate on one side. We find the generalized entropy of the QES to behave as expected from general considerations of unitarity, and in particular that ingoing information disappears from the entanglement wedge after a scambling time β 2π log ∆S`Op1q in accord with expectations for holographic implementations of the Hayden-Preskill protocol. We also find an interesting QES phase transition at what one might call the Page time for our process.

The information paradox can be realized in anti-de Sitter spacetime joined to a Minkowski region. In this setting, we show that the large discrepancy between the von Neumann entropy as calculated by Hawking and the requirements of unitarity is fixed by including new saddles in the gravitational path integral. These saddles arise in the replica method as complexified wormholes connecting different copies of the black hole. As the replica number n → 1, the presence of these wormholes leads to the island rule for the computation of the fine-grained gravitational entropy. We discuss these replica wormholes explicitly in two-dimensional Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity coupled to matter.

We consider a gravity theory coupled to matter, where the matter has a higher-dimensional holographic dual. In such a theory, finding quantum extremal surfaces becomes equivalent to finding the RT/HRT surfaces in the higher-dimensional theory. Using this we compute the entropy of Hawking radiation and argue that it follows the Page curve, as suggested by recent computations of the entropy and entanglement wedges for old black holes. The higher-dimensional geometry connects the radiation to the black hole interior in the spirit of ER=EPR. The black hole interior then becomes part of the entanglement wedge of the radiation. Inspired by this, we propose a new rule for computing the entropy of quantum systems entangled with gravitational systems which involves searching for “islands” in determining the entanglement wedge.

We point out a connection between the emergence of bulk locality in AdS/CFT and the theory of quantum error correction. Bulk notions such as Bogoliubov transformations, location in the radial direction, and the holographic entropy bound all have natural CFT interpretations in the language of quantum error correction. We also show that the question of whether bulk operator reconstruction works only in the causal wedge or all the way to the extremal surface is related to the question of whether or not the quantum error correcting code realized by AdS/CFT is also a "quantum secret sharing scheme", and suggest a tensor network calculation that may settle the issue. Interestingly, the version of quantum error correction which is best suited to our analysis is the somewhat nonstandard "operator algebra quantum error correction" of Beny, Kempf, and Kribs. Our proposal gives a precise formulation of the idea of "subregion-subregion" duality in AdS/CFT, and clarifies the limits of its validity.