Islands and Uhlmann phase: explicit recovery of classical information from evaporating black holes

Abstract

Abstract Recent work has established a route towards the semiclassical validity of the Page curve, and so provided evidence that information escapes an evaporating black hole. However, a protocol to explicitly recover and make practical use of that information in the classical limit has not yet been given. In this paper, we describe such a protocol, showing that an observer may reconstruct the phase space of the black hole interior by measuring the Uhlmann phase of the Hawking radiation. The process of black hole formation and evaporation provides an invertible map between this phase space and the space of initial matter configurations. Thus, all classical information is explicitly recovered. We assume in this paper that replica wormholes contribute to the gravitational path integral.