Holographic subregion complexity in insulator/superconductor transition
Abstract
We study holographic subregion complexity (HSC) across a fully backreacted insulator/superconductor transition in an AdS-soliton background and compare it with holographic entanglement entropy (HEE) and holographic complexity based on the complexity=volume (CV) proposal. Both HSC and HEE signal the second-order transition. For a strip subsystem, competing connected and disconnected Ryu-Takayanagi surfaces give rise to a confinement/deconfinement transition. At fixed chemical potential in the superconducting phase, HSC exhibits a finite jump at the critical width, whereas HEE remains continuous. Beyond this width, HSC grows linearly with the strip width, while HEE is constant. At fixed strip width, HSC first decreases and then increases with chemical potential for ℓ<ℓc, opposite to HEE, but increases monotonically for ℓ>ℓc. After consistent normalization and subtraction of the respective insulating references, the half-space HSC and CV complexity densities are analytically identical. These results show that HSC can diagnose the insulator/superconductor transition, but its qualitative response remains sensitive to the subsystem scale and entanglement-wedge topology.
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BibTeX
@misc{shi2026holographic,
title = {{Holographic subregion complexity in insulator/superconductor transition}},
author = {Yu Shi and Chikun Ding and Yuebing Zhou and Weike Deng and Sheng Long},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = aug,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2608.30852},
eprint = {2608.30852},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30852},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Holographic subregion complexity in insulator/superconductor transition
AU - Yu Shi
AU - Chikun Ding
AU - Yuebing Zhou
AU - Weike Deng
AU - Sheng Long
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/08/31
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2608.30852
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30852
AB - We study holographic subregion complexity (HSC) across a fully backreacted insulator/superconductor transition in an AdS-soliton background and compare it with holographic entanglement entropy (HEE) and holographic complexity based on the complexity=volume (CV) proposal. Both HSC and HEE signal the second-order transition. For a strip subsystem, competing connected and disconnected Ryu-Takayanagi surfaces give rise to a confinement/deconfinement transition. At fixed chemical potential in the superconducting phase, HSC exhibits a finite jump at the critical width, whereas HEE remains continuous. Beyond this width, HSC grows linearly with the strip width, while HEE is constant. At fixed strip width, HSC first decreases and then increases with chemical potential for ℓ<ℓ_c, opposite to HEE, but increases monotonically for ℓ>ℓ_c. After consistent normalization and subtraction of the respective insulating references, the half-space HSC and CV complexity densities are analytically identical. These results show that HSC can diagnose the insulator/superconductor transition, but its qualitative response remains sensitive to the subsystem scale and entanglement-wedge topology.
ER -