Black Hole Information Revisited

Abstract

We argue that four-dimensional black hole evaporation inevitably produces an infinite number of soft particles in addition to the thermally distributed `hard' Hawking quanta, and moreover that the soft and hard particles are highly correlated. This raises the possibility that quantum purity is restored by correlations between the hard and soft radiation, while inclusive measurements which omit the soft radiation observe the thermal Hawking spectrum. In theories whose only stable particle is the graviton, conservation laws are used to argue that such correlations are in principle sufficient for the soft gravitons to purify the hard thermal ones.