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Specific Heats and Schottky Peaks for Black Holes in Extended Thermodynamics

In the extended thermodynamics of black holes, there is a dynamical pressure and its conjugate volume. The phase structure of many of these black holes has been studied a great deal and shown to give close analogues of the phase structure of various ordinary matter systems. However, we point out that the most studied black holes in this framework, such as Schwarzschild-AdS and Reissner-Nordstrom-AdS, and various analogues in higher-derivative gravity, do not have the type of elementary degrees of freedom that play a central role in the classic models of matter. This is because they have vanishing specific heat at constant volume, C_V. As examples with non-vanishing C_V, the Kerr-AdS and STU-AdS black holes do have such degrees of freedom, and a study of C_V(T) reveals Schottky-like behaviour suggestive of a finite window of energy excitations. This intriguing physics may have useful applications in fields such as holographic duality, quantum information, and beyond.