  Black holes offer an exciting area to explore the nature of quantum gravity.
The classic work on Hawking radiation indicates that black holes should decay
via quantum effects, but our ideas about how this might work at a technical
level are incomplete. Recently Almheiri-Marolf-Polchinski-Sully (AMPS) have
noted an apparent paradox in reconciling fundamental properties of quantum
mechanics with standard beliefs about black holes. One way to resolve the
paradox is to postulate the existence of a "firewall" inside the black hole
horizon which prevents objects from falling smoothly toward the singularity. A
fundamental limitation on the behavior of quantum entanglement known as
"monogamy" plays a key role in the AMPS argument. Our goal is to study and
apply many-body entanglement theory to consider the entanglement among
different parts of Hawking radiation and black holes. Using the multipartite
entanglement measure called negativity, we identify an example which could
change the AMPS accounting of quantum entanglement and perhaps eliminate the
need for a firewall. Specifically, we constructed a toy model for black hole
decay which has different entanglement behavior than that assumed by AMPS. We
discuss the additional steps that would be needed to bring lessons from our toy
model to our understanding of realistic black holes.
