On the implications of the Bekenstein bound for black hole evaporation

We elaborate on the possible impact of the Bekenstein bound on the unitarity of black hole evaporation. As such maximal bound on the entropy of any system may be regarded as due to the existence of entities more elementary than the ordinary ones, and since at our energy scales such fundamental degrees of freedom must organize themselves into quantum fields acting on classical space times, we then propose that both, quantum fields and geometries, are emergent phenomena stemming from the same underlying dynamics. We investigate the kinematical and model independent effects of this quasi-particle picture on black hole evaporation within a simple toy model, that we construct. We conclude that the information associated to the quantum fields in the phase before the formation of the black hole is, in general, only partially recovered in the phase after the black hole has evaporated. This information loss is shown to be due to the entanglement between fields and geometry. Such modifications of the Page curve should be regarded as common features of any theory of quantum gravity. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.