Characterizing asymptotically anti-de Sitter black holes with abundant stable gauge field hair

In the light of the ‘no-hair’ conjecture, we revisit stable black holes in su(N) Einstein–Yang–Mills theory with a negative cosmological constant. These black holes are endowed with copious amounts of gauge field hair, and we address the question of whether these black holes can be uniquely characterized by their mass and a set of global non-Abelian charges defined far from the black hole. For the su(3) case, we present numerical evidence that stable black hole configurations are fixed by their mass and two non-Abelian charges. For general N, we argue that the mass and N − 1 non-Abelian charges are sufficient to characterize large stable black holes, in keeping with the spirit of the ‘no-hair’ conjecture, at least in the limit of very large |Λ| and for a subspace containing stable black holes (and possibly some unstable ones as well).