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. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license.