Ginzburg-Landau Vortices

This book is concerned with the study in two dimensions of stationary solutions of u_¿ of a complex valued Ginzburg-Landau equation involving a small parameter ¿. Such problems are related to questions occurring in physics, e.g., phase transition phenomena in superconductors and superfluids. The parameter ¿ has a dimension of a length which is usually small.  Thus, it is of great interest to study the asymptotics as ¿ tends to zero.

One of the main results asserts that the limit u-star of minimizers u_¿ 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 singularities have infinite energy, but after removing the core energy we are lead to a concept of finite renormalized energy.  The location of the singularities is completely determined by minimizing the renormalized energy among all possible configurations of defects. 

The limit u-star can also be viewed as a geometrical object.  It is a minimizing harmonic map into S¹ with prescribed boundary condition g.  Topological obstructions imply that every map u into S¹ with u = g on the boundary must have infinite energy.  Even though u-star has infinite energy, one can think of u-star as having "less" infinite energy than any other map u with u = g on the boundary.

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.