Researchers from the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in Kolkata, India, have delved into the intricate world of black hole thermodynamics and its potential implications for the energy sector. The team, consisting of Md Sabir Ali, Arindam Mondal, and Sushant G. Ghosh, has published their findings in the Journal of High Energy Physics.
The researchers focused on a specific type of black hole, known as Kerr-Sen black holes, which exist in anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime. These black holes are characterized by their mass, a property called dilaton charge, and a negative cosmological constant. The team introduced a dimensionless parameter to simplify their analysis and investigated the phase transitions and critical phenomena of these black holes.
The study involved a systematic analysis of temperature, Gibbs free energy, and volume in an extended phase space. The researchers found that, under certain conditions, the critical points of Kerr-Sen-AdS black holes correspond to those of Kerr-AdS black holes. They also verified the nature of these phase transitions using Ehrenfest equations, which relate different thermodynamic quantities. The team discovered that the phase transitions at critical points are of the second order, a finding that could have implications for understanding similar transitions in other physical systems.
One practical application of this research could be in the field of energy extraction. The researchers proposed investigating the energy extraction process via the Penrose process, a theoretical mechanism for extracting energy from a rotating black hole. This could potentially inspire new methods for harnessing energy in other contexts.
The team also calculated the speed of sound and adiabatic compressibility for rotating Kerr-Sen-AdS black holes, which could provide insights into the behavior of these black holes under different conditions. Furthermore, they calculated thermodynamic quantities of the boundary conformal field theory (CFT) dual to the extended phase space, a topic of interest in theoretical physics.
While this research is primarily theoretical and far removed from immediate practical applications in the energy industry, it contributes to our understanding of complex systems and phase transitions. This knowledge could eventually inform the development of new energy technologies or improve our understanding of existing ones. The full research paper can be found in the Journal of High Energy Physics.
This article is based on research available at arXiv.