Motion of vortices for the extrinsic Ginzburg-Landau flow for vector fields on surfaces

TL;DR

This paper investigates the vortex dynamics in a Ginzburg-Landau model for tangent vector fields on surfaces, accounting for both intrinsic and extrinsic geometric effects, as the parameter epsilon approaches zero.

Contribution

It derives the effective vortex dynamics influenced by surface geometry by analyzing the gradient flow of an extrinsic Ginzburg-Landau functional as epsilon tends to zero.

Findings

Vortex motion is affected by both intrinsic and extrinsic surface properties.

The asymptotic behavior of solutions reveals effective vortex dynamics.

The model extends previous intrinsic theories by incorporating extrinsic effects.

Abstract

We consider the gradient flow of a Ginzburg-Landau functional of the type \[ F_\varepsilon^{\mathrm{extr}}(u):=\frac{1}{2}\int_M \left|D u\right|_g^2 + \left|\mathscr{S} u\right|^2_g +\frac{1}{2\varepsilon^2}\left(\left|u\right|^2_g-1\right)^2\mathrm{vol}_g \] which is defined for tangent vector fields (here $D$ stands for the covariant derivative) on a closed surface $M\subseteq\mathbb{R}^3$ and includes extrinsic effects via the shape operator $\mathscr{S}$ induced by the Euclidean embedding of~$M$. The functional depends on the small parameter $\varepsilon>0$. When $\varepsilon$ is small it is clear from the structure of the Ginzburg-Landau functional that $\left|u\right|_g$ ''prefers'' to be close to $1$. However, due to the incompatibility for vector fields on $M$ between the Sobolev regularity and the unit norm constraint, when $\varepsilon$ is close to $0$, it is expected that a finite number of singular points (called vortices) having non-zero index emerges (when the Euler characteristic is non-zero). This intuitive picture has been made precise in the recent work by R. Ignat \& R. Jerrard [7]. In this paper we are interested the dynamics of vortices generated by $F_\varepsilon^{\mathrm{extr}}$. To this end we study the behavior when $\varepsilon\to 0$ of the solutions of the (properly rescaled) gradient flow of $F_\varepsilon^{\mathrm{extr}}$. In the limit $\varepsilon\to 0$ we obtain the effective dynamics of the vortices. The dynamics, as expected, is influenced by both the intrinsic and extrinsic properties of the surface $M\subseteq\mathbb{R}^3$.