Gauss-Bonnet Black Holes and Holographic Heat Engines Beyond Large N

Abstract: Working in the extended black hole thermodynamics where a dynamical cosmological constant defines a thermodynamic pressure p, we study the efficiency of heat engines that perform mechanical work via the pdV terms now present in the First Law. Here the black hole itself is the working substance, and we focus on a judiciously chosen engine cycle. We work in Gauss-Bonnet-Einstein-Maxwell gravity with negative cosmological constant and, using a high temperature expansion, compare the results for these `holographic' heat engines to that of previously studied cases with no Gauss-Bonnet sector. From the dual holographic large N field theory perspective, this amounts to studying the effects of a class of 1/N corrections to the efficiency of the cycle.