Journal of High Energy Physics (Jul 2022)

The volume of the black hole interior at late times

  • Luca V. Iliesiu,
  • Márk Mezei,
  • Gábor Sárosi

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP07(2022)073
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2022, no. 7
pp. 1 – 37

Abstract

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Abstract Understanding the fate of semi-classical black hole solutions at very late times is one of the most important open questions in quantum gravity. In this paper, we provide a path integral definition of the volume of the black hole interior and study it at arbitrarily late times for black holes in various models of two-dimensional gravity. Because of a novel universal cancellation between the contributions of the semi-classical black hole spectrum and some of its non-perturbative corrections, we find that, after a linear growth at early times, the length of the interior saturates at a time, and towards a value, that is exponentially large in the entropy of the black hole. This provides a non-perturbative test of the complexity equals volume proposal since complexity is also expected to plateau at the same value and at the same time.

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