The topology of nontopological Chern-Simons vortices (Q1819181)

The paper relates the quantized magnetic flux of the (nontopological) vortices in nonrelativistic Chern-Simons theory to the topological degree of the \(S^2\to S^2\) mapping defined by lifting the problem to Riemann spheres. Regular solutions with finite degree only arise for rational functions whose topological degree equals the common number of zeros and poles on the Riemann sphere (also called their algebraic order).