1201.5103 (Sergei Khlebnikov)

Critical current of a superconducting wire via gauge/gravity duality    [PDF]

Sergei Khlebnikov

We describe application of the gauge/gravity to study of depairing current in
thin superconducting wires. The large number N of colors of the gauge theory is
identified with the number of filled transverse channels in the wire. On the
gravity side, the physics is described by a system of D3 and D5 branes
intersecting over a line. We consider both the transition due to an initial
winding of the order parameter (as appropriate for a superconducting ring) and
the transition at fixed current and find them substantially different: while in
the former case the supercurrent is metastable and becomes classically unstable
at some maximal winding, in the latter there is a continuous phase transition
in the universality class of the dissipative XY model. We discuss relation of
our results to recent experiments on statistics of the switching current in
nanowires.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.5103