The Jacobian and the Ginzburg-Landau energy (Q1601054)

The paper deals with the study of the Ginzburg-Landau energy functional on a bounded, open subset of \(\mathbb{R}^2\). The main result of the paper asserts that for any sequence of functions \((u^\varepsilon)\) with uniformly bounded Ginzburg-Landau energy, the corresponding sequence of Jacobians \((Ju^\varepsilon)\) is precompact in an appropriate topology. The authors also characterize all possible weak limits of the Jacobians and prove a \(\Gamma\)-limit result for the Ginzburg-Landau functional. The proofs are based on refined elliptic estimates combined with powerful topological arguments.