Existence of bulk vortices in superconductors with strong magnetic fields

Abstract

We study the vortex formation in extreme type-II superconductors immersed in strong magnetic fields in the framework of the Ginzburg–Landau theory. We focus on the regime where superconductivity survives in the bulk of the material but the magnetic field penetrates the sample, i.e., for an applied field much larger than the first critical one, but below the transition to surface superconductivity. Through a two-scale vortex construction, we obtain precise estimates for the vortex distribution and prove the existence of isolated defects with non-trivial winding numbers. In this respect, our work provides the first rigorous mathematical proof of the existence of isolated vortices for fields comparable to the second critical one.