GAMMA-CONVERGENCE RESULTS FOR SUPERCONDUCTING THIN FILMS WITH HOLES AND FOR GINZBURG-LANDAU MODELS FOR SUPERCONDUCTORS WITH NORMAL INCLUSIONS.

Abstract

We study a Ginzburg--Landau model for an inhomogeneous superconductor in the singular limit as the Ginzburg--Landau parameter tends to infinity. The inhomogeneity is represented by a potential term which vanishes when the order parameter equals a given smooth function, the pinning term, which is assumed to become negative in finitely many smooth subdomains, the ''normally included'' regions. For large exterior magnetic field, we study the Gamma-limit of this inhomogeneous Ginzburg-Landau functional. The vanishing of the given smooth function near the inner boundaries imply that the associated operators are strictly but not uniformly elliptic, leading to many questions to be resolved near the boundaries of the normal regions. The method we use is an extension of many techniques including the product estimate from Sandier-Serfaty, Jacobian estimates from Jerrard-Soner and an appropriate Hodge decomposition adapted to our problem.

To resolve these problems, we first study the Gamma-limit in the simpler case when the pinning term is varying but bounded below by a positive constant. Second, we consider singular limits of the three-dimensional Ginzburg-Landau functional for a superconductor with thin-film geometry, in a constant external magnetic field. The superconducting domain is multiply connected and has a small characteristic thickness, and we consider the simultaneous limit as the thickness tends to zero and the Ginzburg-Landau parameter to infinity. We do this when the applied field is strong in its components tangential to the film domain. Finally, we study the Gamma-limit of the inhomogeneous superconducting Ginzburg-Landau model with the pinning term vanishing on the boundary of the normal regions.