# Loopy Black-Hole Remnants

## TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that loop quantum gravity predicts black-hole remnants with minimal horizons, leading to stable, Planck-scale remnants that cannot evaporate completely, consistent with thermodynamic laws.

## Contribution

It provides a covariant effective model showing black holes evaporate to a minimal horizon size, forming stable remnants in line with quantum gravity predictions.

## Key findings

- Black holes evaporate to a minimal horizon size
- Remnants have masses around 20.94 micrograms
- Final states have zero temperature and entropy

## Abstract

The quantized area predicted by loop quantum gravity suggests the existence of a lower bound for black-hole horizons. We prove this intuition within a covariant effective model for spherical loop quantum gravity, where nonsingular quasi-static black holes evaporate until their horizons attain the smallest positive eigenvalue of the area operator. Consistent with the third law of black-hole thermodynamics, this final state -- characterized by vanishing temperature and entropy -- cannot be realized in finite time. The process thus leads to the formation of stable remnants, whose estimated masses are approximately 20.94$\mu$g, lying in the Planck regime.