Born–Infeld AdS black holes as heat engines

Abstract

We study the efficiency of heat engines that perform mechanical work via the pdV terms present in the first law in extended gravitational thermodynamics. We use charged black holes as the working substance, for a particular choice of engine cycle. The context is Einstein gravity with negative cosmological constant and a Born–Infeld nonlinear electrodynamics sector. We compare the results for these ‘holographic’ heat engines to previous results obtained for Einstein–Maxwell black holes, and for the case where there is a Gauss–Bonnet sector.