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Abstract

In this paper we argue that the information load carried by a black hole affects its classical perturbations. We refer to this phenomenon as the ``swift memory burden effect" and show that it is universal for objects of high efficiency of information storage. The effect is expected to have observable manifestations, for example, in mergers of astrophysical black holes in Einstein gravity. The black holes with different information loads, although degenerate in the ground state, respond very differently to perturbations. The strength of the imprint is controlled by the memory burden parameter which measures the fraction of the black hole's memory space occupied by the information load. This represents a new macroscopic quantum characteristics of a black hole. We develop a calculable theoretical framework and derive some master formulas which we then test on explicit models of black holes as well as on solitons of high capacity of information storage. We show that the effect must be significant for the spectroscopy of both astrophysical and primordial black holes and can be potentially probed in gravitational wave experiments. We also provide a proposal for the test of the memory burden phenomenon in a table-top laboratory setting with cold bosons.