Boundary behavior of the Ginzburg-Landau order parameter in the surface superconductivity regime (Q5962866)

The authors study the behaviour, as \(\varepsilon \to 0\), of minimisers \((\Psi_\varepsilon,A_\varepsilon)\) of the singularly perturbed energy \[ \mathcal{G}_\varepsilon [\Psi,A]=\int_{\Omega}^{}\left\{\left|\left(\nabla+i\frac{A}{\varepsilon^2} \right)\Psi \right|^2-\frac{1}{2b\varepsilon^2}(2|\Psi|^2-|\Psi|^4)+\frac{b}{\varepsilon^4}|\mathrm{curl }A-1|^2\right\}dr \] for \(\Psi \in H^1(\Omega;\mathbb{C})\) and \(A \in H^1(\Omega;\mathbb{R}^2)\), where \(\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^2\) is a compact simply connected set with regular boundary, and \(b\) is a fixed parameter such that \(1<b<\Theta_0^{-1}\) with \(\Theta_0\) denoting the minimal ground state energy of shifted harmonic oscillators on the half-line. The energy \(\mathcal{G}_\varepsilon\) arises in the study of the two-dimensional Ginzburg-Landau (GL) theory for a type-II superconductor in an applied magnetic field varying between the second and third critical value. In this regime, the order parameter \(\Psi_\varepsilon\) minimizing the GL energy is concentrated along the boundary of \(\Omega\), in a thin boundary layer of thickness of order \(\varepsilon\). It is well approximated to leading order (in \(L^2\) norm) by a squeezed, one-dimensional profile in the direction perpendicular to the boundary. More precisely, that one-dimensional profile is that which achieves the minimal ground state energy among a class of shifted nonlinear harmonic oscillators on the half-line. On the other hand, the applied magnetic field is very close to the induced magnetic field, that is \(\mathrm{curl }A_\varepsilon \sim 1\). Motivated by a conjecture of Xing-Bin Pan, they address the question of whether this approximation can hold uniformly in the boundary region. They prove that this is indeed the case as a corollary of a refined, second order energy expansion which includes contributions due to the curvature of the sample.