Thermodynamics of AdS Black Holes in Einstein-Scalar Gravity

Abstract: We study the thermodynamics of $n$-dimensional static asymptotically AdS black holes in Einstein gravity coupled to a scalar field with a potential admitting a stationary point with an AdS vacuum. Such black holes with non-trivial scalar hair can exist provided that the mass-squared of the scalar field is negative, and above the Breitenlohner-Freedman bound. We use the Wald procedure to derive the first law of thermodynamics for these black holes, showing how the scalar hair (or "charge") contributes non-trivially in the expression. We show in general that a black hole mass can be deduced by isolating an integrable contribution to the (non-integrable) variation of the Hamiltonian arising in the Wald construction, and that this is consistent with the mass calculated using the renormalised holographic stress tensor and also, in those cases where it is defined, with the mass calculated using the conformal method of Ashtekar, Magnon and Das. Similar arguments can also be given for the smooth solitonic solutions in these theories. Neither the black hole nor the soliton solutions can be constructed explicitly, and we carry out a numerical analysis to demonstrate their existence and to provide approximate checks on some of our thermodynamic results.