Modifications of the Page Curve from correlations within Hawking radiation

Abstract: We investigate quantum correlations between successive steps of black hole evaporation and investigate whether they might resolve the black hole information paradox. 'Small' corrections in various models were shown to be unable to restore unitarity. We study a toy qubit model of evaporation that allows small quantum correlations between successive steps and reaffirm previous results. Then, we relax the 'smallness' condition and find a nontrivial upper and lower bound on the entanglement entropy change during the evaporation process. This gives a quantitative measure of the size of the correction needed to restore unitarity. We find that these entanglement entropy bounds lead to a significant deviation from the expected Page curve.