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Updated: Jun 27, 2025

Preparation of Free-Surface Hyperbolic Water Vortices
Published on: July 28, 2023
Vortex Effects in Merging Black Holes and Saturons
Gia Dvali1,2, Oleg Kaikov1,2, Florian Kühnel1,2
1Arnold Sommerfeld Center, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Theresienstraße 37, 80333 München, Germany.
Abstract:
Vorticity has recently been suggested to be a property of highly spinning black holes. The connection between vorticity and limiting spin represents a universal feature shared by objects of maximal microstate entropy, so-called saturons. Using Q-ball-like saturons as a laboratory for black holes, we study the collision of two such objects and find that vorticity can have a large impact on the emitted radiation as well as on the charge and angular momentum of the final configuration. As black holes belong to the class of saturons, we expect that the formation of vortices can cause similar effects in black hole mergers, leading to macroscopic deviations in gravitational radiation. This could leave unique signatures detectable with upcoming gravitational-wave searches, which can thereby serve as a portal to macroscopic quantum effects in black holes.
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