Phase structures of 4D stringy charged black holes in canonical ensemble

Abstract

We study the thermodynamics and phase structures of the asymptotically flat dilatonic black holes in 4 dimensions, placed in a cavity a la York, in string theory for an arbitrary dilaton coupling. We consider these charged black systems in canonical ensemble for which the temperature at the wall of and the charge inside the cavity are fixed. We find that the dilaton coupling plays the key role in the underlying phase structures. The connection of these black holes to higher dimensional brane systems via diagonal (double) and/or direct dimensional reductions indicates that the phase structures of the former may exhaust all possible ones of the latter, which are more difficult to study, under conditions of similar settings. Our study also shows that a diagonal (double) dimensional reduction preserves the underlying phase structure while a direct dimensional reduction has the potential to change it.