Generation of vortices for the Ginzburg-Landau heat flow.

We consider the Ginzburg-Landau heat flow on the two-dimensional flat torus, starting from an initial data with a finite number of nondegenerate zeros -- but possibly very high initial energy. We show that the initial zeros are conserved and the flow rapidly enters a logarithmic energy regime, from which the evolution of vortices can be described by the works of Bethuel, Orlandi and Smets.