Asymptotic behavior for minimizers of an anisotropic Ginzburg-Landau functional. (English) Zbl 0986.35103

Ding, Shijin; Liu, Zuhan

Differ. Integral Equ. 13, No. 1-3, 227-254 (2000).

The authors study an anisotropic form of the Ginzburg-Landau functional \[ E_\varepsilon (u,\Omega)= 1/2\int_\Omega \biggl\{a_{ij} u_{xi} u_{xj}+ \bigl[|u|^2- \beta^2(x)\bigr]^2/ (2\varepsilon^2) \biggr\}, \] arising from their theoretical approach to superconductivity. It is closely related to several problems such as the phase transition problem posed in the fundamental paper (*). Here \(\varepsilon>0\) is a “small” positive parameter, while \(\Omega\) is a smooth, open and bounded domain in \(\mathbb{R}^2\). The function \(\beta\) represents “thermal noise”. The map \(g(x): \partial\Omega\to S^1\) is smooth but multi-valued, with topological degree \(d>0\). Let \(W\) denote the set of functions in \(H^1(\mathbb{R}^2, \Omega)\) such that \(u|_{\partial \Omega}= \beta g\), and let \(u_\varepsilon\to W\) be a minimizer of \(E_\varepsilon (u,\Omega)\). The authors prove that there exist finitely many points \(\alpha_i\) such that the minimizers \(u_\varepsilon\) of the functional \(E_\varepsilon (u,\Omega)\) converge to a harmonic map away from points \(\alpha_i\) as \(\varepsilon\to 0\). [(*)V. L. Ginzburg and L. D. Landau, On the theory of superconductivity, J.E.T.P. 20, 1064 (1950)].

Reviewer: Vadim Komkov (Florida)

MSC:

35Q55	NLS equations (nonlinear Schrödinger equations)
49J40	Variational inequalities
35B25	Singular perturbations in context of PDEs
35J20	Variational methods for second-order elliptic equations

Keywords:

superconductivity; Ginzburg-Landau functional; phase-transition; minimizer; harmonic map