Abstract

We study the thermodynamical properties of electrically charged black hole solutions of a nonlinear electrodynamics theory defined by a power p of the Maxwell invariant, which is coupled to Einstein gravity in four and higher spacetime dimensions. Depending on the range of the parameter p, these solutions present different asymptotic behaviors. We compute the Euclidean action with the appropriate boundary term in the grand canonical ensemble. The thermodynamical quantities are identified and, in particular, the mass and the charge are shown to be finite for all classes of solutions. Interestingly, a generalized Smarr formula is derived and it is shown that this latter encodes perfectly the different asymptotic behaviors of the black hole solutions. The local stability is analyzed by computing the heat capacity and the electrical permittivity and we find that a set of small black holes is locally stable. In contrast to the standard Reissner-Nordström solution, there is a first-order phase transition between a class of these nonlinear charged black holes and the Minkowski spacetime. © 2009 The American Physical Society.