We study the triple points and phase diagrams in the extended phase space of the charged Gauss-Bonnet black holes in $d$-dimensional anti-de Sitter space, where the cosmological constant appears as a dynamical pressure of the system and its conjugate quantity is the thermodynamic volume of the black holes. Employing the equation of state $T=T(v,P)$, we demonstrate that the information of the phase transition and behavior of the Gibbs free energy are potential encoded in the $T-v$ ($T-r_h$) line with fixed pressure $P$. We get the phase diagrams for the charged Gauss-Bonnet black holes with different values of the charge $Q$ and dimension $d$. The result shows that the small/large black hole phase transitions appear for any $d$, which is reminiscent of the liquid/gas transition of a Van der Waals type. Moreover, the interesting thermodynamic phenomena, i.e., the triple points and the small/intermediate/large black hole phase transitions are observed for $d=6$ and $Q\in (0.1705,0.1946)$.

The Ruppeiner geometry of thermodynamic fluctuations provides a powerful diagnostic of black hole microstructures. We investigate this for charged anti–de Sitter black holes and find that, while an attractive microstructure interaction dominates for most parameter ranges, a weak repulsive interaction dominates for small black holes of high temperature. This unique property distinguishes the black hole system from that of a van der Waals fluid, where only attractive microstructure interactions are found. We also find two other novel universal properties for charged black holes. One is that the repulsive interaction is independent of the black hole charge and temperature. The other is that the behavior of the Ruppeiner curvature scalar near criticality is characterized by a dimensionless constant that is identical to that for a van der Waals fluid, providing us with new insight into black hole microstructures.

In this paper, we study the phase structure and equilibrium state space geometry of charged topological Gauss-Bonnet black holes in d-dimensional anti–de Sitter spacetime. Several critical points are obtained in the canonical ensemble, and the critical phenomena and critical exponents near them are examined. We find that the phase structures and critical phenomena drastically depend on the cosmological constant Λ and dimensionality d. The result also shows that there exists an analogy between the black hole and the van der Waals liquid gas system. Moreover, we explore the phase transition and possible property of the microstructure using the state space geometry. It is found that the Ruppeiner curvature diverges exactly at the points where the heat capacity at constant charge of the black hole diverges. This black hole is also found to be a multiple system, i.e., it is similar to the ideal gas of fermions in some range of the parameters, while to the ideal gas of bosons in another range.

In this Letter, employing the generalized off-shell free energy, we treat black hole solutions as defects in the thermodynamic parameter space. The results show that the positive and negative winding numbers corresponding to the defects indicate the local thermodynamical stable and unstable black hole solutions, respectively. The topological number defined as the sum of the winding numbers for all the black hole branches at an arbitrary given temperature is found to be a universal number independent of the black hole parameters. Moreover, this topological number only depends on the thermodynamic asymptotic behaviors of the black hole temperature at small and large black hole limits. Different black hole systems are characterized by three classes via this topological number. This number could help us in better understanding the black hole thermodynamics and, further, shed new light on the fundamental nature of quantum gravity.

The discovery of new four-dimensional black hole solutions presents a new approach to understand the Gauss-Bonnet gravity in low dimensions. In this paper, we test the Gauss-Bonnet gravity by studying the phase transition and microstructures for the four-dimensional charged anti–de Sitter black hole. In the extended phase space, where the cosmological constant and the Gauss-Bonnet coupling parameter are treated as thermodynamic variables, we find that the thermodynamic first law and the corresponding Smarr formula are satisfied. Both in the canonical ensemble and grand canonical ensemble, we observe the small-large black hole phase transition, which is similar to the case of the van der Walls fluid. This phase transition can also appear in the neutral black hole system. Furthermore, we construct the Ruppeiner geometry, and find that besides the attractive interaction, the repulsive interaction can also dominate among the microstructures for the small black hole with high temperature in a charged or neutral black hole system. This is quite different from the five-dimensional neutral black hole, for which only dominant attractive interaction can be found. The critical behaviors of the normalized scalar curvature are also examined. These results will shed new light into the characteristic property of four-dimensional Gauss-Bonnet gravity.