Qubit heating near a hotspot

Effective theories describing black hole exteriors contain many open-system features due to the large number of gapless degrees of freedom that lie beyond reach across the horizon. A simple solvable Caldeira-Leggett type model of a quantum field interacting within a small area with many unmeasured thermal degrees of freedom was recently proposed in ref. [23] to provide a toy model of this kind of dynamics against which more complete black hole …