ELECTRICALLY CHARGED SOLITONS IN GAUGE FIELD THEORY

Monopoles and vortices are well known magnetically charged soliton solutions of gauge field equations. Extending the idea of Dirac on monopoles, Schwinger pioneered the concept of solitons carrying both electric and magnetic charges, called dyons, which are useful in modeling elementary particles. Mathematically, the existence of dyons presents interesting variational partial differential equation problems, subject to topological constraints. This article is a survey on recent progress in the study of dyons.