On second-order optimality in the high-$κ$ regime of the Ginzburg-Landau model
This addresses a computational bottleneck in simulating superconductivity models, but it is incremental as it offers preliminary evidence rather than a definitive solution.
The paper tackles the challenge of accurately approximating energy minimizers in the high-κ regime of the Ginzburg-Landau model, where spectral gaps decrease rapidly, and provides numerical evidence supporting a conjectured polynomial dependence of the spectral gap on the GL parameter.
We study energy minimizers of the Ginzburg-Landau (GL) free energy, a fundamental model of superconductivity. We address the high-$κ$ regime, the regime of a large GL parameter, in which energy minimizers exhibit vortex structures whose finite element approximations require a fine mesh resolution. This difficulty is reflected in the error analysis of discrete minimizers, which relies on a second-order optimality condition. The spectrum of the energy's second Fréchet derivative must be bounded away from zero up to symmetry. In practice, the associated spectral gap decreases rapidly with the GL parameter. This degrades the quality of the approximations because the GL parameter directly enters as an additional factor in the error estimates. Although a polynomial dependence of the spectral gap on the GL parameter has been conjectured, its precise behavior remains unclear. As a first step toward addressing this issue, we compute the spectral gap based on a finite element approximation for a range of GL parameters, providing numerical evidence for the conjectured polynomial dependence.