Black hole chemistry : thermodynamics of hairy black holes in lovelock gravity

• Main Author: Tjoa, Erickson
• Other Authors: Chew Lock Yue
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: DRNTU::Science::Physics::Heat and thermodynamics; DRNTU::Science::Physics::Atomic physics::Relativity physics; DRNTU::Science::Physics::Atomic physics::Statistical physics
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/70359
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In this final year project I explore black hole thermodynamics in the context of black hole chemistry. In this framework, the usual black hole thermodynamic phase space is extended to include cosmological constant as thermodynamic pressure. This allows one to study black hole thermodynamics the way it is done for fluid systems, where pressure and volume are important thermodynamic quantities. This thesis examines thermodynamics and phase behavior of a new class of ‘hairy’ black holes in Lovelock gravity. The analysis demonstrates that the presence of conformal scalar hair non-minimally coupled to gravity reproduce almost all known phase behavior in black hole chemistry found in existing literature, and it gives rise to some novel critical phenomena, most notably ‘lambda’ transition found in superfluid/fluid transition in liquid helium-4. This work is based on two published papers earlier in January 2017 as part of collaboration with the theoretical relativity group at University of Waterloo, specifically with Professor Robert B. Mann and Robie A. Hennigar.