Simulation of the magnetic Ginzburg-Landau equation via vortex tracking

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new numerical method for simulating the magnetic Ginzburg-Landau equations in 2D, efficiently capturing vortex dynamics and crystallization patterns without resolving the small core scale.

Contribution

A novel numerical approach for the limiting vortex ODE system that is rigorously justified and avoids fine mesh resolution of the small core size.

Findings

The method accurately simulates vortex evolution in the small epsilon regime.

It captures vortex crystallization and stable pattern formation.

Numerical validation confirms the efficiency and accuracy of the approach.

Abstract

This paper deals with the numerical simulation of the 2D magnetic time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau (TDGL) equations in the regime of small but finite (inverse) Ginzburg-Landau parameter $\epsilon$ and constant (order $1$ in $\epsilon$) applied magnetic field. In this regime, a well-known feature of the TDGL equation is the appearance of quantized vortices with core size of order $\epsilon$. Moreover, in the singular limit $\epsilon \searrow 0$, these vortices evolve according to an explicit ODE system. In this work, we first introduce a new numerical method for the numerical integration of this limiting ODE system, which requires to solve a linear second order PDE at each time step. We also provide a rigorous theoretical justification for this method that applies to a general class of 2D domains. We then develop and analyze a numerical strategy based on the finite-dimensional ODE system to efficiently simulate the infinite-dimensional TDGL equations in the presence of a constant external magnetic field and for small, but finite, $\epsilon$. This method allows us to avoid resolving the $\epsilon$-scale when solving the TDGL equations, where small values of $\epsilon$ typically require very fine meshes and time steps. We provide numerical examples on a few test cases and justify the accuracy of the method with numerical investigations. We end the paper showing that, in the mixed flow case, the limiting ODE system is able to capture the crystallization process in which, for large times, the vortices arrange into a stable pattern.