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Phys. Rev. D 55, 3654–3663 (1997)

Where is the information stored in black holes?

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Gary T. Horowitz
Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106

Donald Marolf
Department of Physics, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York 13244

Received 30 October 1996; published in the issue dated 15 March 1997

It is shown that many modes of the gravitational field exist only inside the horizon of an extreme black hole in string theory. At least in certain cases the number of such modes is sufficient to account for the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. These modes are associated with sources which carry Ramond-Ramond charge, and so may be viewed as the strong-coupling limit of D-branes. Although these sources naturally live at the singularity, they are well defined and generate modes which extend out to the horizon. This suggests that the information in an extreme black hole is not localized near the singularity or the horizon, but extends between them.

© 1997 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevD.55.3654
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevD.55.3654
PACS:
04.70.Dy