A GENERALIZED SELF-DUAL CHERN-SIMONS HIGGS THEORY

In the recently discovered Chern-Simons model, the reduction to a Bogomol'nyi bound or self-duality depends crucially on the specific form of the Higgs potential energy function, which is characterized by a phi(6) type self-interaction. The purpose of this paper is to show that a much wider class of Higgs self-interaction may be allowed to achieve self-duality provided that the kinetic energy term of the Higgs scalar is suitably modified. The existence of topological multivortex solutions is also established. Furthermore, it is remarked that the Meissner effect may occur in the model.