Compacteness methods for certain degenerate elliptic systems.
There is an obvious topological obstruction for a finite energy unimodular harmonic extension of a -valued function defined on the boundary of a bounded regular domain of . When such extensions do not exist, we use the Ginzburg-Landau relaxation procedure. We prove that, up to a subsequence, a sequence of Ginzburg-Landau minimizers, as the coupling parameter tends to infinity, converges to a unimodular harmonic map away from a codimension-2 minimal current minimizing the area within the homology...