Excited states of holographic superconductors

Abstract

In this paper we re-investigate the model of the anti-de Sitter gravity coupled to Maxwell and charged scalar fields, which has been studied as the gravitational dual to a superconductor for a long time since the famous work [Phys.\ Rev.\ Lett.\ {\bf 101}, 031601 (2008)]. By numerical method, we present a novel family of solutions of holographical superconductor with excited states, and find there exists a lower critical temperature in the corresponding excited state. Moreover, we study the condensate and conductivity in the excited states. It is very interesting that the conductivity $\ddot{I}ƒ$ of each excited state has an additional pole in $\text{Im}[\ddot{I}ƒ]$ and a delta function in $\text{Re}[\ddot{I}ƒ]$ arising at the low temperature inside the gap, which is just the evidence of the existence of excited states.

13 pages, 3 figures; V2: discussions and references added, accepted for publication in JHEP