Ginzburg Landau Vortices

This book is concerned with the study in two dimensions of stationary solutions of uɛ of a complex valued Ginzburg-Landau equation involving a small parameter ɛ. Such problems are related to questions occurring in physics, e.g., phase transition phenomena in superconductors and superfluids. The parameter ɛ has a dimension of a length which is usually small. Thus, it is of great interest to study the asymptotics as ɛ tends to zero. One of the main results asserts that the limit u-star of minimizers uɛ exists. Moreover, u-star is smooth except at a finite number of points called defects or vortices in physics. The number of these defects is exactly the Brouwer degree – or winding number – of the boundary condition. Each singularity has degree one – or as physicists would say, vortices are quantized. The material presented in this book covers mostly original results by the authors. It assumes a moderate knowledge of nonlinear functional analysis, partial differential equations, and complex functions. This book is designed for researchers and graduate students alike, and can be used as a one-semester text. The present softcover reprint is designed to make this classic text available to a wider audience.

This book presents the mathematical study of vortices of the two-dimensional Ginzburg-Landau model, an important phenomenological model used to describe superconductivity. The vortices, identified as quantized amounts of vorticity of the superconducting current localized near points, are the objects of many observational and experimental studies, both past and present. The Ginzburg-Landau functionals considered include both the model cases with and without a magnetic field. The book acts a guide to the various branches of Ginzburg-Landau studies, provides context for the study of vortices, and presents a list of open problems in the field.

Aimed at mathematicians, physicists, engineers, and grad students, this monograph will be useful for the nonlinear analysis of problems arising in geometry or mathematical physics. The material presented covers recent and original results by the authors, and serves as an excellent classroom text or a valuable self-study resource.

The topic of this book is systems of points in Coulomb interaction, in particular, the classical Coulomb gas, and vortices in the Ginzburg-Landau model of superconductivity. The classical Coulomb and Log gases are classical statistical mechanics models, which have seen important developments in the mathematical literature due to their connection with random matrices and approximation theory. At low temperature these systems are expected to ``crystallize'' to so-called Fekete sets, which exhibit microscopically a lattice structure. The Ginzburg-Landau model, on the other hand, describes superconductors. In superconducting materials subjected to an external magnetic field, densely packed point vortices emerge, forming perfect triangular lattice patterns, so-called Abrikosov lattices. This book describes these two systems and explores the similarity between them. It presents the mathematical tools developed to analyze the interaction between the Coulomb particles or the vortices, at the microscopic scale, and describes a ``renormalized energy'' governing the point patterns. This is believed to measure the disorder of a point configuration and to be minimized by the Abrikosov lattice in dimension 2. This book gives a self-contained presentation of results on the mean field limit of the Coulomb gas system, with or without temperature, and of the derivation of the renormalized energy. It also provides a streamlined presentation of the similar analysis that can be performed for the Ginzburg-Landau model, including a review of the vortex-specific tools and the derivation of the critical fields, the mean-field limit, and the renormalized energy.

Aimed at mathematicians, physicists, engineers, and grad students, this monograph will be useful for the nonlinear analysis of problems arising in geometry or mathematical physics. The material presented covers recent and original results by the authors, and serves as an excellent classroom text or a valuable self-study resource.

A primer on Ginzberg-Landau Theory considering common and topological excitations including their thermodynamics and dynamical phenomena.

This monograph compiles, rearranges, and refines recent research results in the complex G-L theory with or without immediate applications to the theory of superconductivity. An authoritative reference for applied mathematicians, theoretical physicists and engineers interested in the quantitative description of superconductivity using Ginzburg-Landau theory.