Scrambling Power of Soft Photons

Abstract

Observable scattering processes entail emission-absorption of soft photons. As these degrees of freedom go undetected, some information is lost. Whether some of this information can be recovered in the observation of the hard photons, depends of the actual pattern of the scrambling of information. We compute the information scrambling of photon scattering by the tripartite mutual information in terms of the 2-Renyi entropy, and find a finite amount of scrambling is present. The developed procedure thus sheds novel light on the black hole information loss paradox, showing that scrambling is a byproduct of decoherence achieved by the scattering system in its interaction with the environment, due to the emission-absorption of soft photons in fully unitary processes.