Thermodynamics of Charged Lovelock - AdS Black Holes

TL;DR

This paper studies the thermodynamic properties and phase transitions of charged Lovelock-AdS black holes, analyzing stability, geometric origins of phase changes, and quantizing their area spectrum.

Contribution

It introduces a thermodynamic geometric approach to explain phase transition points and computes the area spectrum for large black holes in Lovelock gravity.

Findings

Divergences in specific heat indicate second order phase transitions.

Thermodynamic curvature singularities correspond to phase transition points.

Large black hole area spectrum is quantized using Bohr-Sommerfeld method.

Abstract

We investigate the thermodynamic behavior of maximally symmetric charged, asymptotically AdS black hole solutions of Lovelock gravity. We explore the thermodynamic stability of such solutions by the ordinary method of calculating the specific heat of the black holes and investigating its divergences which signal second order phase transitions between black hole states. We then utilize the methods of thermodynamic geometry of black hole spacetimes in order to explain the origin of these points of divergence. We calculate the curvature scalar corresponding to a Legendre-invariant thermodynamic metric of these spacetimes and find that the divergences in the black hole specific heat correspond to singularities in the thermodynamic phase space. We also calculate the area spectrum for large black holes in the model by applying the Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization to the adiabatic invariant calculated for the spacetime.