General features of information transfer between quantum subsystems, via
unitary evolution, are investigated, with applications to the problem of
information transfer from a black hole to its surroundings. A particularly
direct form of quantum information transfer is "subspace transfer," which can
be characterized by saturation of a subadditivity inequality. We also describe
more general unitary quantum information transfer, and categorize different
models for black hole evolution. Evolution that only creates paired excitations
inside/outside the black hole is shown not to extract information, but
information-transferring models exist both in the "saturating" and
"non-saturating" category. The former more closely capture thermodynamic
behavior; the latter generically have enhanced energy flux, beyond that of
Hawking.Comment: 31 pages, harvmac. v2: nomenclature change, minor added explanation.
v3: small corrections/rewordings; improved figure; version to match
publication in PR