# Quantization of mass for black holes?

1. Jul 9, 2011

### bcrowell

Staff Emeritus
"Black Hole Masses are Quantized," Gia Dvali, Cesar Gomez, Slava Mukhanov, http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.5894
There is a nontechnical summary on the arxiv blog: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/ [Broken] , along with some inflammatory and uninformed speculation about safety at the LHC, including "This is a debate that particle physicists are strangely reluctant to engage in, having ignored most of the questions marks over safety." In fact, particle physicists have analyzed the issue in great detail: Giddings and Mangano, "Comments on claimed risk from metastable black holes," http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.4087

Anyway, getting back to the actual physics of the paper, the quantization rule they propose is $m=\sqrt{N}m_P$, where mP is the Planck mass. The Planck mass is 10^19 GeV in 3+1 dimensions, but it is much lower if you assume large extra dimensions. IIRC recent LHC results are putting some tough constraints on large extra dimensions, so it is probably not likely that that the ideas in this paper can be confirmed. The area would be quantized in integer multiples of the Planck area, which I guess sounds nice in relation to LQG...?

Last edited by a moderator: May 5, 2017
2. Jul 9, 2011

### qsa

I have already seen such theory long time ago (two years back), I try to dig it up if you are really interested. The way I remember it, the math was very simple.