On a fractional Ginzburg-Landau equation and 1/2-harmonic maps into spheres

To appear in Arch. Rational Mech. Anal.This paper is devoted to the asymptotic analysis of a fractional version of the Ginzburg-Landau equation in bounded domains, where the Laplacian is replaced by an integro-differential operator related to the square root Laplacian as defined in Fourier space. In the singular Ginzburg-Landau limit, we show that solutions with uniformly bounded energy converge weakly to sphere valued 1/2-harmonic maps, i.e., the fractional analogues of the usual harmonic maps. In addition, the convergence holds in smooth functions spaces away from a (n-1)-rectifiable closed set of finite (n-1)-Hausdorff measure. The proof relies on the representation of the square root Laplacian as a Dirichlet-to-Neumann operator in one more dimension, and on the analysis of a boundary version of the Ginzburg-Landau equation. Besides the analysis of the fractional Ginzburg-Landau equation, we also give a general partial regularity result for stationary 1/2-harmonic maps in arbitrary dimension