Surface superconductivity in presence of corners

Abstract

We consider an extreme type-II superconducting wire with non-smooth cross section, i.e. with one or more corners at the boundary, in the framework of the Ginzburg–Landau theory. We prove the existence of an interval of values of the applied field, where superconductivity is spread uniformly along the boundary of the sample. More precisely, the energy is not affected to leading order by the presence of corners and the modulus of the Ginzburg–Landau minimizer is approximately constant along the transversal direction. The critical fields delimiting this surface superconductivity regime coincide with the ones in absence of boundary singularities.