Scuola Normale Superiore, Piazza dei Cavalieri 7, 50126 Pisa, Italy
Abstract:
The author surveys some recent progress on the Toda system on a two-dimensional surface Σ,arising in models from self-dual non-abelian Chern-Simons vortices,as well as in differential geometry.In particular,its variational structure is analysed,and the role of the topological join of the barycentric sets of Σ is shown.