Abstract

We show that the rotating asymptotically anti-de Sitter black hole solution of new massive gravity in three dimensions can support a static stealth configuration given by a conformally coupled scalar field. By static stealth configuration, we mean a nontrivial time-independent scalar field in which the energy-momentum tensor vanishes identically on the rotating black hole metric solution of new massive gravity. The existence of this configuration is rendered possible because of the presence of a gravitational hair in the black hole metric that prevents the scalar field from being trivial. In the extremality due to the gravitational hair, the stealth scalar field diverges at the horizon, as it occurs for the conformal scalar field of the Bocharova-Bronnikov-Melnikov-Bekenstein solution in four dimensions.