Metastability of the Meissner state in the three-dimensional Ginzburg--Landau model with pinning

Abstract

We study the persistence of the Meissner state in the three-dimensional magnetic Ginzburg--Landau model with a spatially dependent pinning term. Factoring out the equilibrium profile associated with the pinning term reduces the problem to the analysis of a weighted Ginzburg--Landau functional. In the extreme type-II regime, we construct locally minimizing vortexless configurations for applied fields extending far beyond the first critical field. We obtain quantitative estimates showing that these configurations remain close, up to gauge transformations, to a Meissner-type state determined by a weighted London problem. We also prove the uniqueness, up to gauge transformations, of the locally minimizing Meissner-type branch within a quantitatively controlled class of local minimizers. A central difficulty is to derive elliptic estimates that remain uniform in the Ginzburg--Landau parameter in the presence of the resulting spatially dependent weight. Under a small-BMO assumption on this weight, we obtain the required regularity and extend to the three-dimensional pinned setting the metastability picture previously established for the homogeneous model.