Hairy black hole entropy and the role of solitons in three dimensions

Scalar fields minimally coupled to General Relativity in three dimensions are considered. For certain families of self-interaction potentials, new exact solutions describing solitons and hairy black holes are found. It is shown that they fit within a relaxed set of asymptotically AdS boundary conditions, whose asymptotic symmetry group coincides with the one for pure gravity and its canonical realization possesses the standard central extension. Solitons are devoid of integration constants and their corresponding (negative) mass, fixed and determined by nontrivial functions of the self-interaction couplings, is shown to be bounded from below by the mass of AdS spacetime. Remarkably, assuming that a soliton corresponds to the ground state of the sector of the theory for which the scalar field is switched on, the semiclassical entropy of the corresponding hairy black hole is exactly reproduced from Cardy formula once nonvanishing lowest eigenvalues of the Virasoro operators are taking into account, being precisely given by the ones associated to the soliton. This provides further evidence about the robustness of previous results, for which the ground state energy instead of the central charge appears to play the leading role in order to reproduce the hairy black hole entropy from a microscopic counting.