Black hole collapse in the 1/c expansion

We present a first-principles CFT calculation corresponding to the spherical collapse of a shell of matter in three dimensional quantum gravity. In field theory terms, we describe the equilibration process, from early times to thermalization, of a CFT following a sudden injection of energy at time t = 0. By formulating a continuum version of Zamolodchikov’s monodromy method to calculate conformal blocks at large central charge c, we give a framework to compute a general class of probe observables in the collapse state, incorporating the full backreaction of matter fields on the dual geometry. This is illustrated by calculating a scalar field two-point function at time-like separation and the time-dependent entanglement entropy of an interval, both showing thermalization at late times. The results are in perfect agreement with previous gravity calculations in the AdS3-Vaidya geometry. Information loss appears in the CFT as an explicit violation of unitarity in the 1/c expansion, restored by nonperturbative corrections.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (NSF grant PHY-0967299)United States. Dept. of Energy (grant Contract Number DE-SC0012567)United States. Dept. of Energy (DOE grant DE-SC0014123)Swiss National Science Foundation (grant number 200021 162796)National Centres of Competence in Research (Switzerland) (NCCR 51NF40-141869 \The Mathematics of Physics" (SwissMAP))Belgian American Educational Foundation, incKavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (programs "Entanglement in Strongly-Correlated Quantum Matter" and "Quantum Gravity: from UV to IR", NSF Grant No. NSF PHY11-25915)