Maggiore observed that, in the high-damping regime, the quasinormal modes spectrum for the Schwarzschild black hole resembles that of a quantum harmonic oscillator. Motivated by this observation, we describe a black hole as a statistical ensemble of $N$ quantum harmonic oscillators. By working in the canonical ensemble, we show that, in the large-mass black hole limit, the leading contribution to the Gibbs entropy is the Bekenstein-Hawking term, while the subleading one is a logarithmic correction, in agreement with several results in the literature. We also find that the number of oscillators scales holographically with the area of the event horizon.

• Received 28 September 2021
• Accepted 22 November 2021

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.104.L121502