# Criticality for charged black branes

## TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that higher curvature gravitational terms induce phase transitions and critical phenomena in charged black branes across all dimensions, with potential implications for dual conformal field theories.

## Contribution

It shows that generalized quasi-topological gravity terms cause critical behavior in charged black branes, extending the understanding beyond Lovelock gravity.

## Key findings

- Critical behavior is generic for black branes in all dimensions ≥ 4.
- Higher curvature terms lead to phase transitions in black branes.
- Critical phenomena are absent in Lovelock and quasi-topological gravity.

## Abstract

We show that the inclusion of higher curvature terms in the gravitational action can lead to phase transitions and critical behaviour for charged black branes. The higher curvature terms considered here belong to the recently constructed generalized quasi-topological class [ArXiv: 1703.01631], which possess a number of interesting properties, such as being ghost-free on constant curvature backgrounds and non-trivial in four dimensions. We show that critical behaviour is a generic feature of the black branes in all dimensions $d \ge 4$, and contextualize the results with a review of the properties of black branes in Lovelock and quasi-topological gravity, where critical behaviour is not possible. These results may have interesting implications for the CFTs dual to this class of theories.