A Beginner’s Guide to Black holes and Information

Fifty years ago, Stephen Hawking astonished the scientific community by demonstrating, through a semiclassical treatment, that black holes are quantum mechanically unstable—they spontaneously lose mass by emitting thermal radiation. The emitted radiation is quantum mechanically entangled with degrees of freedom inside the black hole, which, in the semiclassical description, eventually reach the singularity and disappear from classical spacetime, carrying quantum correlations and information with them. This apparent loss of information sparked an intense debate, which is still ongoing. A plethora of ideas—many rooted in quantum gravity—have been proposed to unravel the fate of information in these scenarios.

The goal of this talk is to provide an introduction—tailored to non experts—to this fascinating topic, aimed at equipping the audience with the necessary background to understand the specific advances that may be presented in other sessions of this conference.