We investigate systematically the effect of the nonlinear correction to the usual Maxwell electrodynamics on the holographic dual models in the backgrounds of AdS black hole and AdS soliton.Considering three types of typical nonlinear electrodynamics, we observe that in the black hole background the higher nonlinear electrodynamics correction makes the condensation harder to form and changes the expected relation in the gap frequency, which is similar to that caused by the curvature correction. However, in strong contrast to the influence of the curvature correction, we find that in the AdS soliton background the nonlinear electrodynamics correction will not affect the properties of the holographic superconductor and insulator phase transitions, which may be a quite general feature for the s-wave holographic superconductor/insulator system.

We analytically investigate the phase transition between the holographic insulator and superconductor with Weyl corrections by using the variational method for the Sturm-Liouville eigenvalue problem. We find that similar to the curvature corrections, in p-wave model, the higher Weyl couplings make the insulator/superconductor phase transition harder to occur. However, in s-wave case the Weyl corrections do not influence the critical chemical potential, which is in contrast to the effect caused by the curvature corrections. Moreover, we observe that the Weyl corrections will not affect the critical phenomena and the critical exponent of the system always takes the mean-field value in both models. Our analytic results are found to be in good agreement with the numerical findings.

We employ the matching method to analytically investigate the holographic superconductors with Lifshitz scaling in an external magnetic field. We discuss systematically the restricted conditions for the matching method and find that this analytic method is not always powerful to explore the effect of external magnetic field on the holographic superconductors unless the matching point is chosen in an appropriate range and the dynamical exponent z satisfies the relation z = d − 1 or z = d − 2. From the analytic treatment, we observe that Lifshitz scaling can hinder the condensation to be formed, which can be used to back up the numerical results. Moreover, we study the effect of Lifshitz scaling on the upper critical magnetic field and reproduce the well-known relation obtained from Ginzburg-Landau theory.

We investigate the effect of the RF 2 correction on the holographic superconductor model in the background of AdS black hole. We find that, similar to the effect caused by the Weyl correction, the higher RF 2 correction term can make it easier for the scalar operator to condense and result in the larger deviations from the expected relation in the gap frequency. However, if a non-trivial hair for the black hole has been triggered, we observe that the RF 2 correction and the Weyl correction do play different roles in the behavior of the condensation, which can be used to support the existing findings.

For a thermodynamic system with multiple pairs of intensive/extensive variables and the thermodynamical coefficients attain finite or infinite values on the phase boundary, we obtain the two classes of Ehrenfest equations in the full phase space, and find that the rank of the matrix for these equations can tell us the dimensions of the phase boundary. We also apply this treatment to the RN-AdS black hole.