Towards a Non-Relativistic Holographic Superfluid

TL;DR

This paper investigates the phase transitions of a holographic superfluid model in non-relativistic conformal field theories, revealing complex behaviors including second-order and first-order transitions, reentrant phases, and potential quantum phase transitions.

Contribution

It introduces a holographic toy model for non-relativistic superfluids and analyzes its phase structure, highlighting novel thermodynamic behaviors and phase transition types.

Findings

Second-order transition to superfluid at low density and temperature

First-order transition driven by chemical potential increase

Reentrant normal phase at high background density and low temperature

Abstract

We explore the phase structure of a holographic toy model of superfluid states in non-relativistic conformal field theories. At low background mass density, we find a familiar second-order transition to a superfluid phase at finite temperature. Increasing the chemical potential for the probe charge density drives this transition strongly first order as the low-temperature superfluid phase merges with a thermodynamically disfavored high-temperature condensed phase. At high background mass density, the system reenters the normal phase as the temperature is lowered further, hinting at a zero-temperature quantum phase transition as the background density is varied. Given the unusual thermodynamics of the background black hole, however, it seems likely that the true ground state is another configuration altogether.