Ginzburg-Landau minimizers near the first critical field have bounded vorticity

Abstract.

We prove that for fields close enough to the first critical field, minimizers of the Ginzburg-Landau functional have a number of vortices bounded independently from the Ginzburg-Landau parameter. This generalizes a result proved in [SS1] and shows that locally minimizing solutions of the Ginzburg-Landau equation found in [S1, S3] are actually global minimizers. It also gives a partial answer to a question raised by F. Bethuel and T. Rivière in [BR].