Scalar-Gauss-Bonnet Gravity and the AdS-CFT Correspondence

Many flavors of scalar-Gauss-Bonnet gravity admit scalarized black hole solutions characterized by a scalar field bound state sourced from a non-minimal gravitational coupling. Flavors which are quadratically coupled to lowest order in the scalar field only source a bound state below a critical black hole mass. Above this critical mass, the black holes are identical to their counterparts in General Relativity. Depending on the exact system and coupling, a phase transition may occur between the scalarized and un-scalarized black holes. The AdS-CFT correspondence relates solutions in anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetimes to a conformal field theory (CFT) on the boundary of that spacetime. For example, black holes in anti-de Sitter spacetimes correspond to thermal states of the CFT. In this talk, I will present results showing that black holes in asymptotically AdS spacetimes scalarize. Consequently, they may exhibit gravitational phase transitions. I will then discuss preliminary results relating this phenomena to a boundary field theory.