04/04/2026
Congratulations to Prof. Seth Major, Ryley McGovern '25, Trevor Scheuing '23, and Thomas (TJ) Takis '26, who have published the paper, "Condensation of area quanta ensembles with quantum statistics in Schwarzschild spacetimes" in Physical Review D!
https://journals.aps.org/prd/pdf/10.1103/tkl8-lfmf?casa_token=dC3fFlxmvUoAAAAA%3AH45P-e-Jg8kmISvPvJ3vLuJuYUv2dP7jaNNbmXOGu28DdczmhNqNXpSVrooOS_iWjReM8Ehl1i0PhzSM
The paper responds to the question “Is spacetime geometry granular?” Major said the paper reports on calculations of black hole entropy - roughly, the logarithm of the number of states required to assemble the black hole - in a framework in which the grains of geometry behave like quantum particles. The calculations demonstrate that when the particles have these quantum properties there are too few states; the entropy is too low. However, when the geometry is in the most likely state, it has quantized areas.
The consequences of these quantized areas are explored in a second paper on the preprint arXiv that Takis worked on, showing the black hole entropy may be sourced from fluctuations of geometry just outside the black hole.
Takis is a physics and mathematics major.
https://www.hamilton.edu/news/story/major-publishes-paper-with-takics-26-mcgovern-25-and-scheuing-24
Thomas (TJ) Takis ’26, Ryley McGovern ’25, Trevor Scheuing ’24, and Litchfield Professor of Astronomy Seth Major recently published a paper on black hole entropy in Physical Review D.
