Brian Dolan (Maynooth):

Black holes and the van der Waals equation of state

Abstract:

Recent developments in the thermodynamics of black holes will be discussed. In the presence of a cosmological constant the resulting pressure allows a thermodynamically conjugate volume to be defined.Four dimensional charged rotating (Reissner-Nordstrom-Kerr) black holes in asymptotically anti-de Sitter space-time will be discussed and it will be shon that there is a line of second order phase transitions with a van der Waals equation of state near the critical points.

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