Variational Analysis of Toda Systems(To Ham with admiration and gratitude)

摘要

The author surveys some recent progress on the Toda system on a twodimensional 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.