| Summary: | 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.
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