Breaking of the universal nature of the central charge criticality in AdS black holes in Gauss-Bonnet gravity

Abstract

In this paper, we have studied the thermodynamics of Gauss-Bonnet black holes in D-dimensional $AdS$ spacetime. Here, the cosmological constant ($\Lambda$), Newton's gravitational constant ($G$) and the Gauss-Bonnet parameter ($\alpha$) are varied in the bulk, and a mixed first law is rewritten considering central charge ($C$) (of dual boundary conformal theory) and its conjugate variable utilising the gauge-gravity duality. A novel universal nature of central charge near the critical point of black hole phase transition in Einstein's gravity has been observed in \cite{mann1}. We observe that this universal nature breaks when such phase transition is considered for black holes in the Gauss-Bonnet gravity. Apart from this, treating the Gauss-Bonnet parameter as a thermodynamic variable as suggested in \cite{kastori} in light of the consistency between first law and the Smarr relation leads to modified thermodynamic volume (conjugate to variable cosmological constant), adding to a new understanding of the Van der Waals gas like behaviour of the black holes in higher dimensional and higher curvature gravity theories. Our analysis considers a general $D$ dimensional background. We have then imposed a greater focus in the analysis of the phase structure of the five dimensional Gauss-Bonnet spacetime. Our analysis also shows that the general universal nature of the critical value of the central charge (which was present in four dimensional $AdS$ spacetime), breaks down in case of five dimensional $AdS$ spacetime even in the absence of Gauss-Bonnet gravity. This finding indicates the universal nature of the central charge may be a special feature of the four dimensional $AdS$ spacetime only.