We study the Ginzburg-Landau functional describing an extreme type-II superconductor wire with cross section with finitely many corners at the boundary. We derive the ground state energy asymptotics up to $ o(1) $ errors in the surface superconductivity regime, i.e., between the second and third critical fields. We show that, compared to the case of smooth domains, each corner provides an additional contribution of order $ \mathcal{O}(1) $ depending on the corner opening angle. The corner energy is in turn obtained from an implicit model problem in an infinite wedge-like domain with fixed magnetic field. We also prove that such an auxiliary problem is well-posed and its ground state energy bounded and, finally, state a conjecture about its explicit dependence on the opening angle of the sector.
We compute the $L^2$-norm of the minimizer of the Ginzburg-Landau functional in a planar domain with a finite number of corners. Our computations are valid for a uniform applied magnetic field, large Ginzburg-Landau parameter and in the regime where superconductivity is confined near the corners of the domain.
We consider an extreme type-II superconducting wire with non-smooth cross section, i.e., with one or more corners at the boundary, in the framework of the Ginzburg-Landau theory. We prove the existence of an interval of values of the applied field, where superconductivity is spread uniformly along the boundary of the sample. More precisely the energy is not affected to leading order by the presence of corners and the modulus of the Ginzburg-Landau minimizer is approximately constant along the transversal direction. The critical fields delimiting this surface superconductivity regime coincide w…
Type-II superconductivity is known to persist close to the sample surface in presence of a strong magnetic field. As a consequence, the ground state energy in the Ginzburg-Landau theory is approximated by an effective one-dimensional model. As shown in [CG2], the presence of corners on the surface affects the energy of the sample with a non-trivial contribution. In [CG2], the two-dimensional model problem providing the corner energy is implicitly identified and, although no explicit dependence of the energy on the corner opening angle is derived, a conjecture about its form is proposed. We stu…
We review some recent results on the phenomenon of surface superconductivity in the framework of Ginzburg-Landau theory for extreme type-II materials. In particular, we focus on the response of the superconductor to a strong longitudinal magnetic field in the regime where superconductivity survives only along the boundary of the wire. We derive the energy and density asymptotics for samples with smooth cross section, up to curvature-dependent terms. Furthermore, we discuss the corrections in presence of corners at the boundary of the sample.
We study the two dimensional water waves problem with surface tension in the case when there is a non-zero contact angle between the free surface and the bottom. In the presence of surface tension, dissipations take place at the contact point. Moreover, when the contact angle is less than $π/6$, no singularity appears in our settings. Using elliptic estimates in corner domains and a geometric approach, we prove an a priori estimate for the water waves problem.
Many earlier works were devoted to the study of the breakdown of superconductivity in type-II superconducting bounded planar domains, submitted to smooth magnetic fields. In the present contribution, we consider a new situation where the applied magnetic field is piecewise-constant, and the discontinuity jump occurs along a smooth curve meeting the boundary transversely. To handle this situation, we perform a detailed spectral analysis of a new effective model. Consequently, we establish the monotonicity of the transition from a superconducting to a normal state. Moreover, we determine the loc…
We study the Ginzburg-Landau model of superconductivity in three dimensions and for strong external magnetic fields. For magnetic field strengths above the phenomenologically defined second critical field it is known from Physics that superconductivity should be essentially restricted to a region near the boundary. We prove that the expected region does indeed carry superconductivity. Furthermore, we give precise energy estimates valid also in the regime around the second critical field which display the transition from bulk superconductivity to surface superconductivity.
Convexity of a yield function (or phase-transformation function) and its relations to convexity of the corresponding yield surface (or phase-transformation surface) is essential to the invention, definition and comparison with experiments of new yield (or phase-transformation) criteria. This issue was previously addressed only under the hypothesis of smoothness of the surface, but yield surfaces with corners (for instance, the Hill, Tresca or Coulomb-Mohr yield criteria) are known to be of fundamental importance in plasticity theory. The generalization of a proposition relating convexity of th…
In this paper we recover the non-perturbative partition function of 2D~Yang-Mills theory from the perturbative path integral. To achieve this goal, we study the perturbative path integral quantization for 2D~Yang-Mills theory on surfaces with boundaries and corners in the Batalin-Vilkovisky formalism (or, more precisely, in its adaptation to the setting with boundaries, compatible with gluing and cutting -- the BV-BFV formalism). We prove that cutting a surface (e.g. a closed one) into simple enough pieces -- building blocks -- and choosing a convenient gauge-fixing on the pieces, and assembli…
We consider the anisotropic Ising model on the triangular lattice with finite boundaries, and use Kaufman's spinor method to calculate low-temperature series expansions for the partition function to high order. From these we can obtain 108-term series expansions for the bulk, surface and corner free energies. We extrapolate these to all terms and thereby conjecture the exact results for each. Our results agree with the exactly known bulk free energy. For the isotropic case, they also agree with Vernier and Jacobsen's conjecture for the $60^{\circ}$ corners, and with Cardy and Peschel's conform…
We present an efficient algorithm for computing the partition function of the q-colouring problem (chromatic polynomial) on regular two-dimensional lattice strips. Our construction involves writing the transfer matrix as a product of sparse matrices, each of dimension ~ 3^m, where m is the number of lattice spacings across the strip. As a specific application, we obtain the large-q series of the bulk, surface and corner free energies of the chromatic polynomial. This extends the existing series for the square lattice by 32 terms, to order q^{-79}. On the triangular lattice, we verify Baxter's …
We investigate, within 2D Ginzburg-Landau theory, the ground state of a type-II superconducting cylinder in a parallel magnetic field varying between the second and third critical values. In this regime, superconductivity is restricted to a thin shell along the boundary of the sample and is to leading order constant in the direction tangential to the boundary. We exhibit a correction to this effect, showing that the curvature of the sample affects the distribution of superconductivity.
We use Kaufman's spinor method to calculate the bulk, surface and corner free energies $f_b, f_s, f_s', f_c$ of the anisotropic square lattice zero-field Ising model for the ordered ferromagnetic case. For $f_b, f_s, f'_s$ our results of course agree with the early work of Onsager, McCoy and Wu. We also find agreement with the conjectures made by Vernier and Jacobsen (VJ) for the isotropic case. We note that the corner free energy $f_c$ depends only on the elliptic modulus $k$ that enters the working, and not on the argument $v$, which means that VJ's conjecture applies for the full anisotropi…
We analyze the response of a type II superconducting wire to an external magnetic field parallel to it in the framework of Ginzburg-Landau theory. We focus on the surface superconductivity regime of applied field between the second and third critical values, where the superconducting state survives only close to the sample's boundary. Our first finding is that, in first approximation, the shape of the boundary plays no role in determining the density of superconducting electrons. A second order term is however isolated, directly proportional to the mean curvature of the boundary. This demonstr…
We consider the bulk, vertical surface, horizontal surface and corner free energies $f_b, f_s, f'_s, f_c$ of the anisotropic self-dual $Q$-state Potts model for $Q > 4$. $f_b$ was calculated in 1973[1]. For $Q<4$, $f_s, f'_s$ were calculated in 1989[2]. Here we extend this last calculation to $Q>4$ and find agreement with the conjectures made in 2012 by Vernier and Jacobsen (VJ)[3] for the isotropic case. All these four free energies satisfy inversion and rotation relations. Together with some plausible analyticity assumptions, these provide a less rigorous, but much simpler, way of determinin…
We discuss some bulk-surfaces gapped Hamiltonians on a lattice with corners and propose a periodic table for topological invariants related to corner states aimed at studies of higher-order topological insulators. Our table is based on four things: (1) the definition of topological invariants, (2) a proof of their relation with corner states (3) computations of K-groups and (4) a construction of explicit examples.
