On the thermodynamics of hairy black holes

We investigate the thermodynamics of a general class of exact 4-dimensional asymptotically Anti-de Sitter hairy black hole solutions and show that, for a fixed temperature, there are small and large hairy black holes similar to the Schwarzschild–AdS black hole. The large black holes have positive specific heat and so they can be in equilibrium with a thermal bath of radiation at the Hawking temperature. The relevant thermodynamic quantities are computed by using the Hamiltonian formalism and counterterm method. We explicitly show that there are first order phase transitions similar to the Hawking–Page phase transition.