Holographic Van der Waals-like phase transition in the Gauss–Bonnet gravity

The Van der Waals-like phase transition is observed in temperature–thermal entropy plane in spherically symmetric charged Gauss–Bonnet–AdS black hole background. In terms of AdS/CFT, the non-local observables such as holographic entanglement entropy, Wilson loop, and two point correlation function of very heavy operators in the field theory dual to spherically symmetric charged Gauss–Bonnet–AdS black hole have been investigated. All of them exhibit the Van der Waals-like phase transition for a fixed charge parameter or Gauss–Bonnet parameter in such gravity background. Further, with choosing various values of charge or Gauss–Bonnet parameter, the equal area law and the critical exponent of the heat capacity are found to be consistent with phase structures in temperature–thermal entropy plane. © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by SCOAP3.