Thermodynamics of the hot BIon Original Research Article

We investigate the thermodynamics of the recently obtained finite temperature BIon solution of [G. Grignani, T. Harmark, A. Marini, N.A. Obers, M. Orselli, Heating up the BIon, ], focusing on two aspects. The first concerns comparison of the free energy of the three available phases for the finite-temperature brane–antibrane–wormhole configuration. Based on this we propose a heuristic picture for the dynamics of the phases that involves a critical temperature below which a stable phase exists. This stable phase is the finite temperature analogue of the thin throat branch of the extremal brane–antibrane–wormhole configuration. The second aspect that we consider is the possibility of constructing a finite temperature generalization of the infinite spike configuration of the extremal BIon. To this end we identify a correspondence point at the end of the throat where the thermodynamics of the D3–F1 blackfold configuration can be matched to that of k non-extremal black fundamental strings.