Stability and thermodynamics of black rings

Abstract

We study the phase diagram of D=5 rotating black holes and the black rings discovered by Emparan and Reall. We address the issue of microcanonical stability of these spacetimes and its relation to thermodynamics by using the so-called ``Poincare method'' of stability. We are able to show that one of the BR branches is always unstable, with a change of stability at the point where both BR branches meet. We study the geometry of the thermodynamic state space (``Ruppeiner geometry'') and compute the critical exponents to check the corresponding scaling laws. We find that, at extremality, the system exhibits a behaviour which, formally, is very similar to that of a second order phase transition.