Paper detail

Can matter really cross a horizon?

It has been taken as a truth that collapsing matter can eventually cross the horizon and enter into the interior of a black hole in a finite proper time. However, the Rindler/tachyon dual description we suggest recently implies that this should not be the case. A test particle falling towards the event horizon of a non-extreme black hole can actually be viewed as an unstable particle, whose dynamics is described by the tachyon field theory. This means that the collapsing process of a free particle in Rindler space is essentially a tachyon condensation process. In terms of the results in tachyon condensation, we learn that the infalling particle should strongly couple to bulk modes and should decay completely into something like gravitons before reaching the horizon. Hence, there should be no matter that can cross a horizon as still matter. The matter will get ``dissolved" into spacetime when approaching the event horizon.