On the bifurcation theory of the Ginzburg-Landau equations

We construct nonminimal and irreducible solutions to the Ginzburg-Landau equations on closed manifolds of arbitrary dimension with trivial first real cohomology. Our method uses bifurcation theory where the “bifurcation points” are characterized by the eigenvalues of a Laplace-type operator. To our knowledge these are the first such examples on nontrivial line bundles.