
Properties of Scalar Hairy Black Holes and Scalarons with Asymmetric Potential
Xiao Yan Chew,
1, 2, ∗
Dong-han Yeom,
1, 2, †
and Jose Luis Bl´azquez-Salcedo
3, ‡
1
Department of Physics Education, Pusan National University, Busan 46241, Republic of Korea
2
Research Center for Dielectric and Advanced Matter Physics,
Pusan National University, Busan 46241, Republic of Korea
3
Departamento de F´sica Te´orica and IPARCOS,
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, E-28040 Madrid, Spain
In this paper we study the properties of black holes and scalarons in Einstein gravity when it is
minimally coupled to a scalar field
φ
with an asymmetric potential
V
(
φ
), constructed in [Phys. Rev.
D
73
(2006), 084002] a few decades ago.
V
(
φ
) has been applied in the cosmology to describe the
quantum tunneling process from the false vacuum to the true vacuum and contains a local maximum,
a local minimum (false vacuum) and a global minimum (true vacuum). In particular we focus on the
asymptotically flat solutions, which can be constructed by fixing appropriately the local minimum of
V
. A branch of hairy black holes solutions emerge from the Schwarzschild black hole, and we study
the domain of existence of such configurations. They can reach to a particle-like solution in the small
horizon limit, i.e. the scalarons. We study the stability of black holes and scalarons, showing that all
of them are unstable under radial perturbations.
I. INTRODUCTION
The “No hair” theorem states that the properties of black holes are only described by the mass, angular momentum
and electrical charge after gravitational collapse or any dynamical perturbations of black holes, since they approach
the stationary limit. However, the “No hair” theorem can be circumvented under the right conditions. For example,
the existence of particle-like solution for SU(2) Einstein-Yang-Mills theory shown by Bartnik and Mckinnon [
1
] had led
to the construction of non-Abelian hairy black holes [
2
–
6
] which don’t obey the “No hair theorem” anymore. One
of the simplest way to circumvent the “No hair” theorem is to minimally couple Einstein gravity with a scalar field,
introducing a scalar potential which is not strictly positive such that the weak energy condition is violated [
7
]. In
[
8
] spherically symmetric and asymptotically flat hairy black holes were constructed by employing a scalar potential
which has a global minimum, a local minimum and a local maximum (asymmetric potential). They obtained the
asymptotically flat black holes by fixing the local minimum of potential to zero, to mainly study the empirical mass
formula of such black holes [
8
] and later also generalize their model to non-minimally coupled scalar field with gravity
[
9
]. However, the properties of black holes such as the Hawking temperature and mass had not been investigated
systematically in terms of the parameters of the scalar potential. In this work we investigate the properties of these
solutions by fixing the global minimum of the potential and varying the local maximum. This allows us to generate a
branch of hairy black holes that bifurcate from the Schwarzschild black holes. See [
10
–
18
] for similar constructions of
scalar hairy black holes.
When there is a scalar field with an asymmetric potential, a quantum tunneling from a false vacuum (a local
minimum) to a true vacuum (a global minimum) is allowed. With an
O
(4)-symmetric metric ansatz, the Coleman-De
Luccia instantons explain such a tunneling process via nucleation of a bubble [
19
]. Even we extend to the spherical
symmetry, again, one can build a solution that explains a tunneling process [
30
]. For both cases, inside is a true-vacuum
region, and after the nucleation, the bubble should expand over the spacetime; otherwise, the scalar field combination
is, in general, unstable. Such a bubble may explain the phase transition of the early universe cosmology [
21
–
26
]; also,
some interactions between bubbles may be a source of gravitational waves [27–29].
On the other hand, one can also say that the same solution can be interpreted as a kind of (unstable) scalarons or
stationary hairy black hole solutions. In order to provide a smooth field configuration at the horizon over the Euclidean
manifold, one needs to provide the Dirichlet boundary condition at the event horizon. If we generalize this boundary
condition and focus only on the astrophysical aspects, it is still allowed to provide more generic boundary conditions
than the pure Dirichlet boundary condition [30,31]. This is the case that we will investigate in the present paper.
This paper is organized as follows. In Sec. II, we briefly introduce our theoretical setup comprising the Lagrangian
∗Electronic address: xychew998@gmail.com
†Electronic address: innocent.yeom@gmail.com
‡Electronic address: jlblaz01@ucm.es
arXiv:2210.01313v1 [gr-qc] 4 Oct 2022