It is sometimes believed that small quantum gravity effects can encode information as 'delicate correlations' in Hawking radiation, thus saving unitarity while maintaining a semiclassical horizon. A recently derived inequality showed that this belief is incorrect: one must have order unity corrections to low energy evolution at the horizon (i.e. fuzzballs) to remove entanglement between radiation and the hole. In this paper we take several models of 'small corrections' and compute the entanglement entropy numerically; in each case this entanglement is seen to monotonically grow, in agreement with the general inequality. We also construct a model of 'burning paper', where the entanglement is found to rise and then return to zero, in agreement with the general arguments of Page. We then note that the fuzzball structure of string microstates offers a version of 'complementarity'. Low energy evolution is modified by order unity, resolving the information problem, while for high energy infalling modes (E >> kT ) we may be able to replace correlators by their ensemble averaged values. Israel (and others) have suggested that this ensemble sum can be represented in the thermo-field-dynamics language as an entangled sum over two copies of the system, giving the two sides of the extended black hole diagram. Thus high energy correlators in a microstate may be approximated by correlators in a spacetime with horizons, with the ensemble sum over microstates acting like the 'sewing' prescription of conformal field theory.

Charge fluctuations for a baryon-neutral quark-gluon plasma have been calculated in lattice gauge theory. These fluctuations provide a well-posed rigorous representation of the quark chemistry of the vacuum for temperatures above T c 155 MeV. Due to the finite lifetime and spatial extent of the fireball created in relativistic heavy ion collisions, chargecharge correlations can only equilibrate for small volumes due to the finite time required to transport charge. This constraint leads to charge correlations at finite relative position that evolve with time. The source and evolution of such correlations is determined by the evolution of the charge fluctuation and the diffusion constant for light quarks. Here, calculations are presented for the evolution of such correlations superimposed onto hydrodynamic simulations. Results are similar to preliminary measurements from STAR, but significant discrepancies remain.

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In this work, we estimate how much bulk viscosity driven by Urca processes is likely to affect the gravitational wave signal of a neutron star coalescence. In the late inspiral, we show that bulk viscosity affects the binding energy at fourth post-Newtonian (PN) order. Even though this effect is enhanced by the square of the gravitational compactness, the coefficient of bulk viscosity is likely too small to lead to observable effects in the waveform during the late inspiral, when only considering the orbital motion itself. In the post-merger, however, the characteristic time-scales and spatial scales are different, potentially leading to the opposite conclusion. We post-process data from a state-of-the-art equal-mass binary neutron star merger simulation to estimate the effects of bulk viscosity (which was not included in the simulation itself). In that scenario, we find that bulk viscosity can reach high values in regions of the merger. We compute several estimates of how much it might directly affect the global dynamics of the considered merger scenario, and find that it could become significant. Even larger effects could arise in different merger scenarios or in simulations that include non-linear effects. This assessment is reinforced by a quantitative comparison with relativistic heavy-ion collisions where such effects have been explored extensively.

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