Singular limits for thin film superconductors in strong magnetic fields (Q2852333)

This paper deals with singular limits of the Ginzburg-Landau energy functional associated to thin-film superconductors. The first main result of this paper establishes a \(\Gamma\)-convergence property. A related result concerns the construction of recovery sequences. In the same spirit, the authors establish the convergence of minimizers of the mean-field limit. This property can be formulated by means of the convex duality in order to obtain an equivalent formulation of the problem as a variational inequality. The proofs combine asymptotic analysis techniques, elliptic estimates, and \(\Gamma\)-convergence methods. In the final part of this paper there are given two interesting examples. In the first example, the vortices accumulate in two symmetrically placed subdomains in the disk, one containing positively oriented vortices, and the other antivortices (with negative winding). The second example illustrates the phenomenon of concentration on curves and annular subdomains, which occurs even in a simply connected domain in the thin-film limit.