Uniqueness of vortexless Ginzburg-Landau type minimizers in two dimensions

In a simply connected two dimensional domain Ω, we consider Ginzburg-Landau minimizers u with zero degree Dirichlet boundary condition ${g \in H^{1/2}(\partial \Omega; \mathbb{S}^1)}$ . We prove uniqueness of u whenever either the energy or the Ginzburg-Landau parameter are small. This generalizes a result of Ye and Zhou requiring smoothness of g. We also obtain uniqueness when Ω is multiply connected and the degrees of the vortexless minimizer u are prescribed on the components of the boundary, generalizing a result of Golovaty and Berlyand for annular domains. The proofs rely on new global estimates connecting the variation of |u| to the Ginzburg-Landau energy of u. These estimates replace the usual global pointwise estimates satisfied by ${\nabla u}$ when g is smooth, and apply to fairly general potentials. In a related direction, we establish new uniqueness results for critical points of the Ginzburg-Landau energy.