Linear and nonlinear aspects of vortices. The Ginzburg-Landau model (Q1573978)

Superconductivity was discovered in 1991 by the Dutch physicist Kamerlingh-Onnes. Superconducting materials exhibit two main properties: (i) their electric resistivity is virtually zero, and (ii) they have peculiar magnetic behaviour. The first successful theory for superconductivity was the phenomenological macroscopic model proposed in 1935 by London. His theory accounted for the expulsion of magnetic fields and predicted the quantization of magnetic fluxoids. Then, in 1950, V.L. Ginzburg and L.D. Landau proposed a more involved theory which allowed for spatial variations of both the magnetic field and the superconductivity order parameter. In addition to the model's success in explaining the experimental observations of the day, it was used by Abrikosov in 1957 to predict the existence of type II superconductors and the formation of magnetic vortices for such materials. In 1994, F. Bethuel, H. Brezis and F. Hélein proposed a mathematical model of the Ginzburg-Landau theory which gives a very interesting relationship between the number of vortices and a topological invariant of the boundary condition. A fundamental role in their asymptotic analysis is played by the notion of renormalized energy. The present monograph contains new and deep original results in the geometrical theory of Ginzburg-Landau vortices. The fundamental microscopic particles that dominate superconductivity are pairs of electrons, known as Cooper pairs. Their behaviour is governed by the Bose-Einstein statistics, and are allowed to reside in the same quantum state. In particular they are allowed to reside together in the state of lowest energy. This is in accordance with the main thermodynamic postulate of superconductivity. Ginzburg and Landau assumed that the physical quantities that characterize steady state superconductivity are the Cooper pair condensate wave function \(u\) and the potential associated to the induced magnetic field \(A\). The density function of the Cooper pairs (superconducting electrons) is proportional to \(|u|^2\), and the superconducting current is determined by its phase. The Ginzburg-Landau free energy is then defined by \[ G_\varepsilon (u,A)=\int_\Omega |\nabla u-iAu|^2+ \frac{1}{2\varepsilon^2}\int_\Omega (1-|u|^2)^2+\int_\Omega |dA-h_{\text{ext}}|^2, \] where \(\Omega\) is a smooth, bounded and simply connected domain in \({\mathbb R}^2\), and \(h_{\text{ext}}\) denotes the external magnetic field. The positive parameter \(\varepsilon\), which has the dimension of a length, depends on the material and its temperature. In the physics literature it is called the (Ginzburg-Landau) coherence length (or healing length or core radius) and is often denoted by \(\xi =\xi(T)\). For temperatures \(T<T_c\) (the critical temperature) with \(T\) not too close to \(T_c\), \(\xi (T)\) is extremely small, hence it is of interest to study the asymptotics as \(\varepsilon\rightarrow 0\). The book has 12 chapters and the material is suitable for a reader knowleadgeable in the general area of nonlinear problems arising in geometry or mathematical physics. Chapter 1 is a thorough treatment of the quantitative theory of Ginzburg-Landau equations. After a brief review of the integrable and the strongly repulsive cases, the authors state an existence result which will be proved in the first part of the book. In the second part of the monograph it is explained how the local uniqueness result induces a complete description of the branches of solutions converging to a limit configuration all of whose vortices have topological degree \(\pm 1\). This result is stated in the last paragraph of the first chapter and, together with the existence result, is one of the main theorems of the book. Chapter 2 gives the basic concepts and properties related to elliptic operators in weighted spaces and the authors concentrate on the case of the Laplacian in some bounded open subsets of \({\mathbb R}^n\). Further estimates for solutions of elliptic problems in weighted Sobolev spaces can be found in Chapter 8. The proof of the main existence result Theorem 1.9 is given in Chapters 3 through 7. The construction of the solution uses essentially a fixed point theorem for contraction mappings in weighted Hölder spaces. As a simple corollary of the construction of Ginzburg-Landau vortices the authors obtain a local uniqueness result for the solution of the Ginzburg-Landau equation. Part 2 of the book deals specifically with the proof of the uniqueness result (Theorem 1.10). One of the key points of the proof is a Pohozaev type formula for conformal fields. This formula is a modification of the standard Pohozaev formula used in the study of semilinear equations and a complete proof together with further comments are given in Chapter 9. Using this variant of Pohozaev's formula the authors prove in the next chapter that, under some natural assumptions on the energy, two solutions of the Ginzburg-Landau equation which have the same boundary data and the same zeros are necessarily identical for small values of the parameter \(\varepsilon\). This uniqueness result enables the authors to prove the following interesting result conjectured by F. Bethuel, H. Brezis and F. Hélein: any critical point of the Ginzburg-Landau functional (for \(\Omega =B_1\), \(A=0\)) which is equal to \(e^{i\theta}\) on the boundary is, for \(\varepsilon\) sufficiently small, the unique axially symmetric solution of the Ginzburg-Landau equation with boundary data \(g=e^{i\theta}\). In the last chapter of this work the authors show how, in the strongly repulsive case, the analysis of the previous chapters can be carried over for proving uniqueness results for the gauge invariant functional. The authors achieve their goals of presenting in a clear fashion a framework in which weighted Hölder spaces, conservation laws and variational techniques are considered as fundamental concepts and tools. This book is suitable for readers with a knowledge of nonlinear partial differential equations and should appeal to researchers interested in such diverse areas as phase transition or differential operators over manifolds with corners. For all these reasons, the reviewer strongly believes that ``Linear and Nonlinear Aspects of Vortices (The Ginzburg-Landau Model)'' is an outstanding contribution to the field and should be available in all mathematics and physics libraries.