On the first critical field in Ginzburg-Landau theory for thin shells and manifolds (Q717472)

In this paper the author investigates the response of a thin superconducting shell to an arbitrary external magnetic field. The intensity of the applied field is taken of the order of the so-called first critical field \(H_{c1}\) in Ginzburg-Landau theory. The main goal of the paper is to identity the asymptotic value of \(H_{c1}\) as one lets the Ginzburg-Landau parameter \(\kappa\) go to infinity, under the assumtion that the thickness of the sample is sufficienty small. Once this is established, he specializes in shells constituting a neighbourhood of a simply connected surface of revolution and takes the applied field to be constant and vertical. Next step is to determine in this particular case the exact number of vortex lines present in minimizers of the Ginzburg-Landau functional when the intensity of the external field is raised above \(H_{c1}\) by a lower order term. Additionaly he finds analytically the asymptotic location of vortices. The vortex lines consists of two collections that concentrate near the poles. Finally, it is proved the \(\Gamma\)-convergence for three-dimensional domains of small thickness, where in this setting the point vortices are replaced by vortex lines.