Holographic Entanglement Entropy and Van der Waals transitions in Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton theory

Abstract: According to the gauge/gravity duality, the Van der Waals transition of charged AdS black holes in extended phase space is conjectured to be dual to a renormalization group flow on the space of field theories. So exploring the Van der Waals transition is potentially valuable for studying holographic properties of charged black hole thermodynamics. There are different transition behaviors for charged dilatonic AdS black holes in Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton (EMD) theory with string-inspired potential with different dilaton coupling constants in diverse dimensions. In this work, we find a special class of charged dilatonic AdS black holes which have the standard Van der Waals transition. We study the extended thermodynamics of the special class of black holes, which, in the extremal limit, have near-horizon geometry conformal to AdS$_2 \times S^{D-2}$. We find that, for these black holes, both the pressure-volume transition in fixed charge ensemble and the inverse temperature-entropy transition in fixed pressure ensemble have the standard Van der Waals behaviors. We also find the holographic entanglement entropy undergoes the same transition behaviors for the same critical temperature in fixing the thermodynamic pressure ensemble.