Barrow’s nonlinear charged anti-de Sitter black hole and stability

Abstract As we know, the horizon area of a black hole will increase when it absorbs matter. Based on Barrow’s concept of a fractal black hole horizon, it has been proposed (Phys Lett B 831:137181, 2022) that for a spherically fractal structure, the minimum increase in the horizon area is the area of the smallest bubble sphere. The corresponding black hole entropy is of a logarithmic form, which is similar to that of Boltzmann entropy under a certain condition. Based on this, we re-derive the entropy of Barrow’s Einstein–power-Yang–Mills (EPYM) anti-de Sitter (AdS) black hole, and calculate its temperature and heat capacity. There exists an interesting phenomenon wherein the ratio between Barrow’s temperature and the Hawking temperature of the EPYM AdS black hole is fully consistent with that of other Schwarzschild-like black holes. The Barrow and Hawking temperatures within a certain range of $$\Lambda $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>Λ</mml:mi> </mml:math> are found to increase monotonically, and the corresponding heat capacities are all positive, which means that these black holes are thermodynamically stable. In addition, for Barrow’s EPYM AdS black hole, its heat capacity has a Schottky anomaly-like behavior, which may reflect the existence of a discrete energy level and microscopic degrees of freedom.