Phases of holographic superconductors with broken translational symmetry

© 2015, The Author(s). Abstract: We consider holographic superconductors in a broad class of massive gravity backgrounds. These theories provide a holographic description of a superconductor with broken translational symmetry. Such models exhibit a rich phase structure: depending on the values of the temperature and the disorder strength the boundary system can be in superconducting, normal metallic or normal pseudo-insulating phases. Furthermore the system supports interesting collective excitation of the charge carriers, which appears in the normal phase, persists in the superconducting phase, but eventually gets destroyed by the superconducting condensate. We also show the possibility of building a phase diagram of a system with the superconducting phase occupying a dome-shaped region on the temperature-disorder plane.