Eur. Phys. J. C (2019) 79:148
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-019-6643-5
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Holographic entanglement entropy with Born–Infeld
electrodynamics in higher dimensional AdS black hole spacetime
Weiping Yao
1
, Wenqing Zha
1
, Qiannan An
1
, Jiliang Jing
2,a
1
Department of electrical engineering, Liupanshui Normal University, Liupanshui 553004, Guizhou, People’s Republic of China
2
Department of Physics, Key Laboratory of Low Dimensional Quantum Structures and Quantum Control of Ministry of Education, and Synergetic
Innovation Center for Quantum Effects and Applications, Hunan Normal University, Changsha 410081, Hunan, People’s Republic of China
Received: 8 January 2019 / Accepted: 3 February 2019 / Published online: 19 February 2019
© The Author(s) 2019
Abstract We examine the entanglement entropy in higher
dimensional holographic metal/superconductor model with
Born–Infeld (BI) electrodynamics. We note that the entan-
glement entropy is still a powerful tool to probe the critical
phase transition point and the order of the phase transition
in higher dimensional AdS spacetime. Due to the presence
of the BI electromagnetic field, the formation of the scalar
condensation becomes harder. For both operators O
+
and
O
−
, we show that the entanglement entropy in the metal
phase decreases as the BI factor increases, but in condensa-
tion phase the entanglement entropy increases monotonically
for stronger nonlinearity of BI electromagnetic field. Further-
more, we also study the influence of the width of the subsys-
tem on the holographic entanglement entropy and observe
that with the increase of the width the entanglement entropy
increases.
1 Introduction
The entanglement entropy serves as a key quantity to mea-
sure how the subsystem and its complement are correlated
[1]. In strongly coupled system, the entanglement entropy is
expected to be a useful tool to keep track of the degree of free-
dom while other traditional methods might not be available.
However, the calculation of entanglement entropy is usually
a not easy task except for the case in 1+1 dimensions. In the
spirit of the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory (AdS/CFT)
correspondence [2–4], Ryu and Takayanagi have provided a
holographic proposal to compute the entanglement entropy in
[5,6]. It states that the entanglement entropy of a d+1 dimen-
sional CFT at strong coupling can be investigated from a
weakly coupled gravity dual characterized by an asymptot-
ically AdS
d
+ 2 spacetime. With this elegant approach, the
a
e-mail: jljing@hunnu.edu.cn
holographic entanglement entropy is widely used to study
properties of phase transitions in holographic superconduc-
tor models [7–12]. The behavior of the entanglement entropy
in metal/superconductor phase transition was studied in [13]
and observed that the entanglement entropy is lower in the
superconductor phase than in the normal phase. In the insu-
lator/superconductor model, the non-monotonic behavior of
the entanglement entropy was found in Ref. [14]. Then, the
study of entanglement entropy was also extended to other
various holographic superconductors applications [15–26].
The purpose of this paper is to study further the behaviors
of the holographic entanglement entropy for metal/super-
conductor model with BI electrodynamics in higher dimen-
sional AdS spacetime. On the one hand, the motivations for
studying the entanglement entropy in higher dimensional
black hole spacetime comes from the string theory which
contains gravity and requires more than four dimensions
[27,28]. Furthermore, as mathematical objects, black hole
spacetimes are among the most important Lorentzian Ricci-
flat manifolds in any dimension [29]. On the other hand,
the BI electrodynamics [30] introduced in 1930s by Born
and Infeld to obtain a classical theory of charged particles
with finite self-energy, is the only possible non-linear version
of electrodynamics which is invariant under electromagnetic
duality transformations and has been a focus for these years
since most physical systems are inherently nonlinear to some
extent [31–38]. The Lagrangian of the BI gauge field and its
expression is given by
L
BI
=
1
b
2
⎛
⎝
1 −
1 +
b
2
F
μν
F
μν
2
⎞
⎠
, (1)
where F
μν
= ∂
μ
A
ν
− ∂
ν
A
μ
is the strength of the BI elec-
trodynamic field. b is the BI coupling parameter. In the limit
b → 0, the BI field will reduce to the Maxwell field. It is
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