### Particle, Astrophysics, And Nuclear Physics Seminar

Monday, November 30, 2020
2:00pm – 3:00pm

Storrs Campus
online

Prof. H.Haggard, Bard College

Why do so many black holes measured in gravitational waves have zero spin?

Black hole entropy is a robust prediction of quantum gravity with no established phenomenological consequences to date. We use the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy formula and general-relativistic statistical mechanics to determine the probability distribution of random geometries uniformly sampled in phase space. We show that this statistics (in the limit $$\hbar \to 0$$ ) is relevant to large curvature perturbations, resulting in a population of primordial black holes with zero natal spin. In principle, the identification of such a population at LIGO, Virgo, and future gravitational wave observatories could provide the first observational evidence for the statistical nature of black hole entropy.

Contact:

Prof. L. Jin

Physics Department (primary), College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, UConn Master Calendar