Black Hole Chemistry

The mass of a black hole has traditionally been identified with its energy. We describe a new perspective on black hole thermodynamics, one that identifies the mass of a black hole with chemical enthalpy, and the cosmological constant as thermodynamic pressure. This leads to an understanding of black holes from the viewpoint of chemistry, in terms of concepts such as Van der Waals fluids, reentrant phase transitions, and triple points. Both charged and rotating black holes exhibit novel chemical-type phase behaviour, hitherto unseen.Comment: 12 pages, Essay written for the Gravity Research Foundation 2014 Awards for Essays on Gravitatio

Another Mass Gap in the BTZ Geometry?

We attempt the construction of perturbative rotating hairy black holes and boson stars, invariant under a single helical Killing field, in 2+1-dimensions to complete the perturbative analysis in arbitrary odd dimension recently put forth in \cite{Stotyn:2011ns}. Unlike the higher dimensional cases, we find evidence for the non-existence of hairy black holes in 2+1-dimensions in the perturbative regime, which is interpreted as another mass gap, within which the black holes cannot have hair. The boson star solutions face a similar impediment in the background of a conical singularity with a sufficiently high angular deficit, most notably in the zero-mass BTZ background where boson stars cannot exist at all. We construct such boson stars in the AdS_3 background as well as in the background of conical singularities of periodicities \pi,2\pi/3,\pi/2.Comment: 13 pages, 2 appendices, Invited Contribution to an IOP special volume of Journal of Physics A in honor of Stuart Dowker's 75th birthday, v2: discussion in section 4 expande