Holographic conductivity of holographic superconductors with higher-order corrections

Abstract We analytically and numerically disclose the effects of the higher-order correction terms in the gravity and in the gauge field on the properties of s-wave holographic superconductors. On the gravity side, we consider the higher curvature Gauss–Bonnet corrections and on the gauge field side, we add a quadratic correction term to the Maxwell Lagrangian. We show that, for this system, one can still obtain an analytical relation between the critical temperature and the charge density. We also calculate the critical exponent and the condensation value both analytically and numerically. We use a variational method, based on the Sturm–Liouville eigenvalue problem for our analytical study, as well as a numerical shooting method in order to compare with our analytical results. For a fixed value of the Gauss–Bonnet parameter, we observe that the critical temperature decreases with increasing the nonlinearity of the gauge field. This implies that the nonlinear correction term to the Maxwell electrodynamics makes the condensation harder. We also study the holographic conductivity of the system and disclose the effects of the Gauss–Bonnet and nonlinear parameters $$\alpha $$ α and b on the superconducting gap. We observe that, for various values of $$\alpha $$ α and b, the real part of the conductivity is proportional to the frequency per temperature, $$\omega /T$$ ω/T , as the frequency is large enough. Besides, the conductivity has a minimum in the imaginary part which is shifted toward greater frequency with decreasing temperature