We study critical points of the Ginzburg-Landau (GL) functional and the abelian Yang-Mills-Higgs (YMH) functional on the sphere and the complex projective space, both equipped with the standard metrics. For the GL functional we prove that on $S^{ n}$ with $n \geq 2$ and $\mathbb{ CP}^{ n}$ with $n \geq 1$, stable critical points must be constants. In addition, for GL critical points on $S^{ n}$ for $n \geq 3$ we obtain a lower bound on the Morse index under suitable assumptions. On the other hand, for the abelian YMH functional we prove that on $S^{ n}$ with $n \geq 4$ there are no stable critical points unless the line bundle is isomorphic to $S^n \times \mathbb{ C}$, in which case the only stable critical points are the trivial ones. Our methods come from the work of Lawson--Simons.
Categories: math.DG math.AP