Small Spins of Primordial Black Holes from Random Geometries: Bekenstein-Hawking Entropy and Gravitational Wave Observations

Abstract

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 $\hslash \to 0$) 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.

9 pages, 3 figures; v2: New section on general-relativistic statistical mechanics

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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Searching for Eccentricity: Signatures of Dynamical Formation in the First Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalogue of LIGO and Virgo
• On the single-event-based identification of primordial black hole mergers at cosmological distances