Magnetic vortices for a Ginzburg-Landau type energy with discontinuous constraint. II (Q1012847)

The authors study nucleation of vortices for a Ginzburg-Landau type energy (labelled \(G_{\varepsilon,H}(\psi ,A)\)) with discontinuous constraint. Here \(\varepsilon >0\) is a characteristic of the superconducting sample, \(H\geq 0\) is the intensity of the applied magnetic field, \(\psi \) is the order parameter whose modulus \(|\psi|^2\) measures the density of the superconducting electron Cooper pairs, and the real vector \(A\) is the magnetic potential. Using an idea of Lassoued-Mironescu, the authors write \(G_{\varepsilon,H}(\psi,A)\) in the form \(G_{\varepsilon,0}(u_\varepsilon,0)+F_{\varepsilon,H}(\psi/u_\varepsilon,A),\) where \(u_\varepsilon\) is the unique positive minimizer of \(G_{\varepsilon,0}(u_\varepsilon,0)\). They proved that if \(\lim_{\varepsilon\to0}H/|\ln \varepsilon|=\lambda\) \((\lambda >0)\), then \(\frac{F_{\varepsilon H}}{H^2}\to E_\lambda\) in the sense of \(\Gamma\)-convergence and they describe the limiting vorticity measure in terms of the minimizer of the limiting energy \(E_\lambda\). For part I, cf. \url{arXiv:0711.4248}.