The Cauchy problem for Manton's Chern-Simons-Schrödinger equation

Abstract

The Chern-Simons-Schrödinger equation (in the temporal gauge) arises as the Hamiltonian flow of the abelian Higgs energy on $\mathbb R^2$. Manton (arXiv:hep-th/9701027) introduced the equation as a model for the dynamics of the critical points of the energy, known as vortices. He conjectured that, for a certain range of coupling constants, the vortex motion under the Chern-Simons-Schrödinger flow can be effectively captured by a first-order ODE on the moduli space of self-dual vortices constructed by Jaffe-Taubes (1980) and Samols (1992). As a first step towards a rigorous proof of Manton's conjecture, we formulate the Cauchy problem in DeTurck gauge within the natural energy space and prove global well-posedness. We also obtain, as a corollary of the well-posedness theory and the stability results in our previous work (arXiv:2603.24900), orbital stability of the self-dual vortices under the Chern-Simons-Schrödinger flow near self-dual coupling. The heart of our analysis lies in developing a geometric Littlewood-Paley theory based on the covariant heat equation in caloric gauge, which we use to perform a paradifferential-style decomposition of the Chern-Simons-Schrödinger equation.