Abstract
We study the minimizers of an energy functional which is obtained as the Γ-limit of a family of functionals depending on a small parameter ε > 0, associated with a function u ∈ BV(Ω, S1) and a positive parameter p. We find necessary and sufficient conditions on p and the dimension under which these minimizers coincide with the optimal liftings of u, for every u ∈ BV(Ω, S1).