Symmetry of local minimizers for the three-dimensional Ginzburg-Landau functional (Q990218)

The paper is dealing with symmetry properties of weak solutions \(u:\mathbb R^3\rightarrow\mathbb R^3\) of the Ginzburg-Landau equation \(\Delta u+u(1-|u|^2)=0\). This equation is naturally associated to the local energy functional \[ E(v;\Omega)=\tfrac{1}{2}\int_\Omega(|\nabla v|^2+\tfrac{1}{2}(1-|v|^2)^2)\,dx, \] where \(\Omega\) is a bounded domain. The main result shows that, up to a translation of the domain and an orthogonal transformation of the image, any local minimizer satisfying certain boundedness condition is of the form \(u(x)=\frac{x}{|x|}f(|x|)\), where \(f\) is an icreasing function such that \(f(0)=0\) and \(f(\infty)=1\).