Critical current of a superconducting wire via gauge/gravity duality

Abstract

We describe application of the gauge/gravity duality to study of thin superconducting wires at finite current. 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 the ground state of the system at fixed electric current and find that at zero temperature the normal state is always unstable with respect to appearance of a superconducting component. We discuss relation of our results to recent experiments on statistics of the switching current in nanowires.