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The firewall was introduced into black hole evaporation scenarios as a deus ex machina designed to break entanglements and preserve unitarity (Almheiri et.al., 2013). Here we show that the firewall actually exists and does break entanglements, but only in the context of a virtual reality for observers stationed near the horizon, who are following the long-term evolution of the hole. These observers are heated by acceleration radiation at the Unruh temperature and see pair creation at the horizon as a high-energy phenomenon. The objective reality is very different. We argue that Hawking pair creation is entirely a low-energy process in which entanglements never arise. The Hawking particles materialize as low-energy excitations with typical wavelength considerably larger than the black hole radius. They thus emerge into a very non-uniform environment inimical to entanglement-formation., Comment: 3 pages, no figures

We consider the application of the Aichelburg-Sexl boost to plane and line distributions of matter. Our analysis shows that for a domain wall the space-time after the boost is flat except on a null hypersurface which is the history of a null shell. For a cosmic string we study the influence of the boost on the conical singularity and give the new value of the conical deficit., Comment: Latex File, 12 pages, accepted for publication in Physical Review D

In this paper we calculate the entropy of a thin spherical shell that contracts reversibly from infinity down to its event horizon. We find that, for a broad class of equations of state, the entropy of a non-extremal shell is one-quarter of its area in the black hole limit. The considerations in this paper suggest the following operational definition for the entropy of a black hole: $S_{BH}$ is the equilibrium thermodynamic entropy that would be stored in the material which gathers to form the black hole, if all of this material were compressed into a thin layer near its gravitational radius. Since the entropy for a given mass and area is maximized for thermal equilibrium we expect that this is the maximum entropy that could be stored in the material before it crosses the horizon. In the case of an extremal black hole the shell model does not assign an unambiguous value to the entropy., Comment: 15 pages, LaTeX, submitted to Phys. Rev. D

A general analysis of the gravitational dynamics of a medium with a continuous distribution of vorticity indicates that the answer to the question raised in the title is affirmative, contrary to a recent claim., Comment: 11 pages, LaTeX with amslatex macros

We construct a static axisymmetric wormhole from the gravitational field of two Schwarzschild particles which are kept in equilibrium by strings (ropes) extending to infinity. The wormhole is obtained by matching two three-dimensional timelike surfaces surrounding each of the particles and thus spacetime becomes non-simply connected. Although the matching will not be exact in general it is possible to make the error arbitrarily small by assuming that the distance between the particles is much larger than the radius of the wormhole mouths. Whenever the masses of the two wormhole mouths are different, causality violating effects will occur., Comment: 12 pages, LaTeX, 1 figure

Quantum corrections are studied for a charged black hole in a two-dimensional model obtained by spherisymmetric reduction of the 4D Einstein-Maxwell theory. The classical (tree-level) thermodynamics is re-formulated in the framework of the off-shell approach, considering systems at arbitrary temperature. This implies a conical singularity at the horizon and modifies the gravitational action by terms defined on the horizon. A consistent variational procedure for the action functional is formulated. It is shown that the free energy reaches an extremum on the regular manifold with $T=T_H$. The one-loop contribution to the action in the Liouville-Polyakov form is re-examined. All the boundary terms are taken into account and the dependence on the state of the quantum field is established. The modification of the Liouville-Polyakov term for a 2D space with a conical defect is derived. The backreaction of the Hawking radiation on the geometry is studied and the quantum-corrected black hole metric is calculated perturbatively. Within the off-shell approach the one-loop thermodynamical quantities, energy and entropy, are found. They are shown to contain a part due to hot gas surrounding he black hole and a part due to the hole itself. It is noted that the contribution of the hot gas can be eliminated by appropriate choice of the (generally, non-flat) reference geometry. The deviation of the {\it `` entropy - horizon area''} relation for the quantum-corrected black hole from the classical law is discovered and possible physical consequences are discussed., Comment: Latex, 32 pages

The paper develops a $(2+2)$-imbedding formalism adapted to a double foliation of spacetime by a net of two intersecting families of lightlike hypersurfaces. The formalism is two-dimensionally covariant, and leads to simple, geometrically transparent and tractable expressions for the Einstein field equations and the Einstein-Hilbert action, and it should find a variety of applications. It is applied here to elucidate the structure of the characteristic initial-value problem of general relativity., Comment: 22 pages, latex, one figure in a separate file

We analyze the relativistic dynamical properties of Keplerian and non-Keplerian circular orbits in a general axisymmetric and stationary gravitational field, and discuss the implications for the stability of co- and counter-rotating accretion disks and tori surrounding a spinning black hole. Close to the horizon there are orbital peculiarities which can seem counterintuitive, but are elucidated by formulating the dynamics in terms of the orbital velocity actually measured by a local, zero-angular-momentum observer., Comment: 14 pages, latex, no figures

The internal structure of a charged spherical black hole is still a topic of debate. In a nonrotating but aspherical gravitational collapse to form a spherical charged black hole, the backscattered gravitational wave tails enter the black hole and are blueshifted at the Cauchy horizon. This has a catastrophic effect if combined with an outflux crossing the Cauchy horizon: a singularity develops at the Cauchy horizon and the effective mass inflates. Recently a numerical study of a massless scalar field in the \RN background suggested that a spacelike singularity may form before the Cauchy horizon forms. We will show that there exists an approximate analytic solution of the scalar field equations which allows the mass inflation singularity at the Cauchy horizon to exist. In particular, we see no evidence that the Cauchy horizon is preceded by a spacelike singularity., Comment: 11 pages, latex, 2 figures

We review the evidence for and against the possibility that the inner singularity of a black hole contains a lightlike segment which is locally mild and characterized by mass inflation., Comment: 5 pages, Latex 5 pages 2 postscript figures,Alberta-Thy-9-94