Vortex solutions of Liouville equation and quasi spherical surfaces

Abstract

We identify the two-dimensional surfaces corresponding to certain solutions of the Liouville equation of importance for mathematical physics, the non-topological Chern-Simons (or Jackiw-Pi) vortex solutions, characterized by an integer $N\ge 1$. Such surfaces, that we call $S^2(N)$, have positive constant Gaussian curvature, $K$, but are spheres only when $N=1$. They have edges, and, for any fixed $K$, have maximal radius $c$ that we find here to be $c=N/\sqrt{K}$. If such surfaces are constructed in a laboratory by using graphene (or any other Dirac material), our findings could be of interest to realize table-top Dirac massless excitations on nontrivial backgrounds. We also briefly discuss the type of three-dimensional spacetimes obtained as the product $S^2(N)\times \mathbb{R}$.

17 pages, 15 figures;