The thermodynamic phase space of GaussBonnet (GB) AdS black holes is extended, taking the inverse of the GB coupling constant as a new thermodynamic pressure P GB . We studied the critical behavior associated with P GB in the extended thermodynamic phase space at fixed cosmological constant and electric charge. The result shows that when the black holes are neutral, the associated critical points can only exist in five dimensional GB-AdS black holes with spherical topology, and the corresponding critical exponents are identical to those for the Van der Waals system. For charged GB-AdS black holes, it is shown that there can be only one critical point in five dimensions (for black holes with either spherical or hyperbolic topologies), which also requires the electric charge to be bounded within some appropriate range; while in d > 5 dimensions, there can be up to two different critical points at the same electric charge, and the phase transition can occur only at temperatures which are not in between the two critical values.

Treating the cosmological constant as thermodynamic pressure and its conjugate as thermodynamic volume, we investigate the critical behavior of the third-order Lovelock black holes in diverse dimensions. For black hole horizons with different normalized sectional curvature k = 0, ±1, the corresponding critical behaviors differ drastically. For k = 0, there is no critical point in the extended thermodynamic phase space. For k = −1, there is a single critical point in any dimension d ≥ 7, and for k = +1, there is a single critical point in 7 dimensions and two critical points in 8, 9, 10, 11 dimensions. We studied the corresponding phase structures in all possible cases.

The extended phase space thermodynamics and heat engines for static spherically symmetric black hole solutions of four dimensional conformal gravity are studied in detail. It is argued that the equation of states (EOS) for such black holes is always branched, any continuous thermodynamical process cannot drive the system from one branch of the EOS into another branch. Meanwhile, the thermodynamical volume is bounded from above, making the black holes always super-entropic in one branch and may also be super-entropic in another branch in certain range of the temperature. The Carnot and Stirling heat engines associated to such black holes are shown to be distinct from each other. For rectangular heat engines, the efficiency always approaches zero when the rectangle becomes extremely narrow, and given the highest and lowest working temperatures fixed, there is always a maximum for the efficiency of such engines.Comment: 21 pages, 10 figures. To appear in IJMP

Direct collection, conversion and storage of solar radiation as thermal energy are crucial to the efficient utilization of renewable solar energy and the reduction of global carbon footprint. This work reports a facile approach for rapid and efficient charging of thermal energy storage materials by the instant and intense photothermal effect of uniformly distributed plasmonic nanoparticles. Upon illumination with both green laser light and sunlight, the prepared plasmonic nanocomposites with volumetric ppm level of filler concentration demonstrated a faster heating rate, a higher heating temperature and a larger heating area than the conventional thermal diffusion based approach. With controlled dispersion, we further demonstrated that the light-to-heat conversion and thermal storage properties of the plasmonic nanocomposites can be fine-tuned by engineering the composition of the nanocomposites.

We present the construction of Maxwell's equal area law for the Guass-Bonnet AdS black holes in d = 5, 6 and third order Lovelock AdS black holes in d = 7, 8. The equal area law can be used to find the number and location of the points of intersection in the plots of Gibbs free energy, so that we can get the thermodynamically preferred solution which corresponds to the first order phase transition. We obtain the radius of the small and large black holes in the phase transition which share the same Gibbs free energy. The case with two critical points is explored in much more details. The latent heat is also studied.