AdS and Lifshitz black hole solutions in conformal gravity sourced with a scalar field

In this paper we obtain exact asymptotically anti-de Sitter black hole solutions and asymptotically Lifshitz black hole solutions with dynamical exponents z= 0 and z= 4 of four-dimensional conformal gravity coupled with a self-interacting conformally invariant scalar field. Then, we compute their thermodynamical quantities, such as the mass, the Wald entropy and the Hawking temperature. The mass expression is obtained by using the generalized off-shell Noether potential formulation. It is found that the anti-de Sitter black holes as well as the Lifshitz black holes with z= 0 have zero mass and zero entropy, although they have non-zero temperature. A similar behavior has been observed in previous works, where the integration constant is not associated with a conserved charge, and it can be interpreted as a kind of gravitational hair. On the other hand, the Lifshitz black holes with dynamical exponent z= 4 have non-zero conserved charges, and the first law of black hole thermodynamics holds. Also, we analyze the horizon thermodynamics for the Lifshitz black holes with z= 4, and we show that the first law of black hole thermodynamics arises from the field equations evaluated on the horizon. Furthermore, we study the propagation of a conformally coupled scalar field on these backgrounds and we find the quasinormal modes analytically in several cases. We find that for anti-de Sitter black holes and Lifshitz black holes with z= 4, there is a continuous spectrum of frequencies for Dirichlet boundary condition; however, we show that discrete sets of well defined quasinormal frequencies can be obtained by considering Neumann boundary conditions. (C) 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.