Paper detail

Ginzburg-Landau relaxation for harmonic maps on planar domains into a general compact vacuum manifold

We study the asymptotic behaviour, as a small parameter $\varepsilon$ tends to zero, of minimisers of a Ginzburg-Landau type energy with a nonlinear penalisation potential vanishing on a compact submanifold $\mathcal{N}$ and with a given $\mathcal{N}$-valued Dirichlet boundary data. We show that minimisers converge up to a subsequence to a singular $\mathcal{N}$-valued harmonic map, which is smooth outside a finite number of points around which the energy concentrates and whose singularities' location minimises a renormalised energy, generalising known results by Bethuel, Brezis and Hélein for the circle $\mathbb{S}^1$. We also obtain $Γ$-convergence results and uniform Marcinkiewicz weak $L^2$ or Lorentz $L^2$ estimates on the derivatives. We prove that solutions to the corresponding Euler-Lagrange equation converge uniformly to the constraint and converge to harmonic maps away from singularities.