Meissner States of Type II Superconductors

Abstract

This paper concerns mathematical theory of Meissner states of a bulk superconductor of type $I\!I$, which occupies a bounded domain $\Omega$ in $\Bbb R^3$ and is subjected to an applied magnetic field below the critical field $H_{S}$. A Meissner state is described by a solution $(f,\mathbf A)$ of a nonlinear partial differential system called Meissner system, where $f$ is a positive function on $\Omega$ which is equal to the modulus of the order parameter, and $\mathbf A$ is the magnetic potential defined on the entire space such that the inner trace of the normal component on the domain boundary $\partial\Omega$ vanishes. Such a solution is called a Meissner solution. Various properties of the Meissner solutions are examined, including regularity, classification and asymptotic behavior for large value of the Ginzburg-Landau parameter $\kappa$. It is shown that the Meissner solution is smooth in $\Omega$, however the regularity of the magnetic potential outside $\Omega$ can be rather poor. This observation leads to the ides of decomposition of the Meissner system into two problems, a boundary value problem in $\Omega$ and an exterior problem outside of $\Omega$. We show that the solutions of the boundary value problem with fixed boundary data converges uniformly on $\Omega$ as $\kappa$ tends to $\infty$, where the limit field of the magnetic potential is a solution of a nonlinear curl system. This indicates that, the magnetic potential part $\mathbf A$ of the solution $(f,\mathbf A)$ of the Meissner system, which has same tangential component of $curl \mathbf A$ on $\partial\Omega$, converges to a solution of the curl system as $\kappa$ increases to infinity, which verifies that the curl system is indeed the correct limit of the Meissner system in the case of three dimensions.