Do Black Holes Store Negative Entropy?

Abstract

Abstract The Bekenstein–Hawking equation states that black holes should have entropy proportional to their areas to make black hole physics compatible with the second law of thermodynamics. However, this equation leads to an inconsistency among the first law of black hole mechanics, the entropy conservation law of quantum mechanics, and a heuristic picture for Hawking radiation—creation of entangled pairs near the horizon. Here we propose an equation alternative to the Bekenstein–Hawking equation from the viewpoint of quantum information, to resolve this inconsistency without changing Hawking’s original pair-creation picture for the radiation. This argues that the area of any stationary black hole, including Kerr and charged ones, is proportional to the coherent information—which is “minus” the conditional entropy defined only in the quantum regime—from the outside, to the black hole excluding negative-frequency particles generated by Hawking’s pair creation. Our equation suggests that negative-frequency particles inside a black hole behave as if they have “negative” entropy. Our result implies that a black hole stores purely quantum information, rather than classical information, and the area of the event horizon describes the number of Bell pairs that can be distilled between the interior and exterior.