The Research Management Center congratulates Associate Professor Dr. Lim Yen Kheng from Mathematics Programme on his recent publication entitled Charged dilaton black hole with multiple Liouville potentials and gauge fields, as the First and Corresponding Author. The paper was published in the Journal of High Energy Physics (Volume 2020, article number 134) on 24 March 2020, one of theleading journals (SCI Tier-1) in the field of high energy physics.

According to the research, one of the biggest unsolved problems in theoretical physics today is quantum gravity. Related to this is the holographic principle, where there is a conjectured correspondence between a non-gravitational theory and a gravitational one with an extra dimension. This leads to the intriguing idea that the universe is actually a lower-dimensional hologram, or so-called “gauge/gravity duality”.

Fig. 1: A schematic representation of the gauge/gravity correspondence.

Aside from this radical suggestion about the universe, the gauge/gravity correspondence is also used to solve problems in condensed matter physics. The gravity dual to many condensed matter systems are black holes in Lifshitz spacetime. In recent years, much effort has been put into constructing a gravitational system that can give rise to such a black hole. In this work, the author provides a method to construct such a solution using gauge (electromagnetic) fields and a scalar field with certain potentials. The research also shows how this solution reduces to other known solutions in literature for the appropriate choice of parameters. This solution has interesting thermodynamic behaviour where the black hole may become unstable and undergo a phase transition.

Fig. 2: The plot of free energy against black hole temperature. The graph exhibits the signature swallowtail feature which indicates the presence of a phase transition.

Associate Professor Dr. Lim Yen Kheng received his PhD from National University of Singapore in December 2015, where he then worked as an instructor. He has published 15 papers in journals including Physical Review D, Classical and Quantum Gravity, and the International Journal of Modern Physics. His research interests are black holes, cosmology, and theoretical/mathematical physics.

The article is free for download at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FJHEP03%282020%29134.