Superconductivity and the Aharonov-Bohm effect (Q666747)

The paper studies the influence of the Aharonov-Bohm magnetic potential on the onset of superconductivity in the framework of the Ginzburg-Landau (GL) model. With this aim, the Ginzburg-Landau functional for the energy $\varphi$ in a disc sample and the magnetic Sobolev space is written, taking into account the diamagnetic inequality. Then the GL functional is scaled and the energy $\varphi$ is defined on the natural variational space $H$. A critical point of the functional is a weak solution to the corresponding Euler-Lagrange equation (that is the Ginzburg-Landau equation in this case). Moreover, the critical point is a minimizer if it minimizes the scaled GL functional in the variational space $H$. The main result (Theorem 1.1) involves a positive spectral constant $\lambda$, defining the ranges of changing a characteristic parameter $\kappa$ of the sample ($\kappa$ is approximately defined by a difference between the critical temperature and the sample temperature, i.e., positivity of $\kappa$ signifies that the sample is cooled down below its critical temperature), which states the conditions for minimizers of the scaled GL functional and for triviality of the critical point of the functional. Theorem 1.1 is consistent with the Little-Parks experiment and displays the analogy between the Aharonov-Bohm magnetic potential and non-simply connected domains. The proof of Theorem 1.1 relies on the periodicity of the principal eigenvalue of the Aharonov-Bohm Hamiltonian. Such periodicity results are quite common in the Aharonov-Bohm setting, for example in domains with holes, annuli and annulus-like domains with Dirichlet condition. The proof of Theorem 1.1 carries over in these situations as well, with due modifications, including the formulation of the GL functional in non-simply connected domains, and the replacement of the flux condition by circulation conditions for the Aharonov-Bohm potential around the holes of the domain.