Interaction energy of Chern-Simons vortices in the gauged O(3) sigma model

The purpose of this Letter is to present a computation of the interaction energy of gauged O(3) Chern-Simons vortices which are infinitely separated. The results will show the behaviour of the interaction energy as a function of the constant coupling the potential, which measures the relative strength of the matter self-coupling and the electromagnetic coupling. We find that vortices attract each other for λ > 1 and repel when λ < 1. When λ = 1 there is a topological lower bound on the energy. It is possible to saturate the bound if the fields satisfy a set of first order partial differential equations.