Vortex-type Half-BPS Solitons in ABJM Theory

We study Aharony-Bergman-Jafferis-Maldacena (ABJM) theory without and with mass deformation. It is shown that maximally supersymmetry preserving, D-term, and F-term mass deformations of single mass parameter are equivalent. We obtain vortex-type half-BPS equations and the corresponding energy bound. For the undeformed ABJM theory, the resulting half-BPS equation is the same as that in supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory and no finite energy regular BPS solution is found. For the mass-deformed ABJM theory, the half-BPS equations for U(2)xU(2) case reduce to the vortex equation in Maxwell-Higgs theory, which supports static regular multi-vortex solutions. In U(N)xU(N) case with N>2 the nonabelian vortex equation of Yang-Mills-Higgs theory is obtained.