Imprint of black hole area quantization and Hawking radiation on inspiraling binary

TL;DR

This paper explores how black hole area quantization and Hawking radiation could leave observable signatures in gravitational wave signals from inspiraling binaries, potentially revealing quantum gravity effects.

Contribution

It introduces a model of gravitational wave dephasing due to black hole area quantization and assesses its observability in inspiral signals.

Findings

Quantization causes measurable dephasing in gravitational waves.

High black hole spins can suppress tidal heating signatures.

Detecting non-zero tidal heating can challenge area quantization models.

Abstract

We study the potential of gravitational wave astronomy to observe the quantum aspects of black holes. According to Bekenstein's quantization, we find that black hole area discretization can have observable imprints on the gravitational wave signal from an inspiraling binary black hole. We study the impact of quantization on tidal heating. We model the absorption lines and compute gravitational wave flux due to tidal heating in such a case. By including the quantization we find the dephasing of the gravitational wave, to our knowledge it has never been done before. We discuss the observability of the phenomena in different parameter ranges of the binary. We show that in the inspiral, it leads to vanishing tidal heating for the high spin values. Therefore measuring non-zero tidal heating can rule out area quantization. We also argue that if area quantization is present in nature then our current modeling with reflectivity can possibly probe the Hawking radiation which may bring important information regarding the quantum nature of gravity.