Renormalized Ginzburg-Landau energy and location of near boundary vortices

We consider the location of near boundary vortices which arise in the study of minimizing sequences of Ginzburg-Landau functional with degree boundary condition. As the problem is not well-posed — minimizers do not exist, we consider a regularized problem which corresponds physically to the presence of a superconducting layer at the boundary. The study of this formulation in which minimizers now do exist, is linked to the analysis of a version of renormalized energy. As the layer width decreases to zero, we show that the vortices of any minimizer converge to a point of the boundary with maximum curvature. This appears to be the first such result for complex-valued Ginzburg-Landau type problems.