ON THE SECOND CRITICAL FIELD FOR A GINZBURG–LANDAU MODEL WITH FERROMAGNETIC INTERACTIONS

We consider a two-dimensional Ginzburg–Landau model for superconductors which exhibit ferromagnetic ordering in the superconducting phase, introduced by physicists to describe unconventional p-wave superconductors. In this model the magnetic field is directly coupled to a vector-valued order parameter in the energy functional. We show that one effect of spin coupling is to increase the second critical field H c2 , the value of the applied magnetic field at which superconductivity is lost in the bulk. Indeed, when the spin coupling is strong we show that the upper critical field is no longer present, confirming predictions in the physics literature. We treat the energy density as a measure, and show that the order parameter converges (as the Ginzburg–Landau parameter κ→∞) in an average sense to a constant determined by the average energy.