Stability of Holographic Superconductors

Sugumi Kanno, Jiro Soda

Published 2010-07-28, updated 2010-10-26Version 2

We study the dynamical stability of holographic superconductors. We first classify perturbations around black hole background solutions into vector and scalar sectors by means of a 2-dimensional rotational symmetry. We prove the stability of the vector sector by explicitly constructing the positive definite Hamiltonian. To reveal a mechanism for the stabilization of a superconducting phase, we construct a quadratic action for the scalar sector. From the action, we see the stability of black holes near a critical point is determined by the equation of motion for a charged scalar field. We show the effective mass of the charged scalar field in hairy black holes is always above the Breitenlohner-Freedman bound near the critical point due to the backreaction of a gauge field. It implies the stability of the superconducting phase. We also argue that the stability continues away from the critical point.