Counterterm method in Einstein dilaton gravity and the critical behavior of dilaton black holes with a power-Maxwell field

Abstract

We investigate the critical behavior of a ($n+1$)-dimensional topological dilaton black holes in an extended phase space in both canonical and grand-canonical ensembles, when the gauge field is in the form of a power-Maxwell field. In order to do this, we introduce for the first time the counterterms that remove the divergences of the action in dilaton gravity for the solutions with curved boundary. Using the counterterm method, we calculate the conserved quantities and the action and, therefore, the Gibbs free energy in both the canonical and grand-canonical ensembles. We treat the cosmological constant as a thermodynamic pressure, and its conjugate quantity as a thermodynamic volume. In the presence of the power-Maxwell field, we find an analogy between the topological dilaton black holes with a van der Walls liquid-gas system in all dimensions provided the dilaton coupling constant $\ensuremath{\alpha}$ and the power parameter $p$ are chosen properly. Interestingly enough, we observe that the power-Maxwell dilaton black holes admit the phase transition in both canonical and grand-canonical ensembles. This is in contrast to RN-AdS, Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton and Born-Infeld-dilaton black holes, which only admit the phase transition in the canonical ensemble. In addition, we calculate the critical quantities and show that they depend on $\ensuremath{\alpha}$, $n$ and $p$. Finally, we obtain the critical exponents in the two ensembles and show that they are independent of the model parameters and have the same values as in the mean-field theory.