Entropy/information flux in Hawking radiation

Abstract

Blackbody radiation contains (on average) an entropy of 3.9\pm2.5 bits per photon. If the emission process is unitary, then this entropy is exactly compensated by "hidden information" in the correlations. We extend this argument to the Hawking radiation from GR black holes, demonstrating that the assumption of unitarity leads to a perfectly reasonable entropy/information budget. The key technical aspect of our calculation is a variant of the "average subsystem" approach developed by Page, which we extend beyond bipartite pure systems, to a tripartite pure system that considers the influence of the environment.