Elizabethan vortices

Abstract

Radial solutions to the elliptic sinh-Gordon and Tzitzeica equations can be interpreted as Abelian vortices on certain surfaces of revolution. These surfaces have a conical excess angle at infinity (in a way which makes them similar to Elizabethan ruff collars). While they can not be embedded in the Euclidean 3-space, we will show that they can be globally embedded in the hyperbolic space. The existence of these hyperbolic embeddings follows from the asymptotic analysis of a Painleve III ODE.