Black Hole Enthalpy and Scalar Fields

Abstract

The mass of an AdS black hole represents its enthalpy, which in addition to internal energy, generally includes the energy required to assemble the system in its environment. In this paper, we consider black holes immersed in a more complex environment, generated by a scalar field with an exponential potential. In the analogue of the AdS vacuum, which we call dilaton-AdS, the scalar field has non-trivial behavior, breaking the hyperscaling symmetry of AdS and modifying the asymptotic form of the spacetime. We find that the scalar field falloff at infinity makes novel contributions to the ADM mass and spatial tensions of dilaton-AdS black holes. We derive a first law and Smarr formula for planar dilaton-AdS black holes. We study the analogue of thermodynamic volume in this system and show that the mass of a black hole again represents its enthalpy.