Nicholas Manton received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1978. Following postdoctoral positions at the Ecole Normale in Paris, M.I.T. and UC Santa Barbara, he returned to Cambridge and is now Professor of Mathematical Physics in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and currently head of the department's High Energy Physics group. He is a Fellow of St John's College. He introduced and helped develop the method of modelling topological soliton dynamics by geodesic motion on soliton moduli spaces. Paul Sutcliffe received his PhD from the University of Durham in 1992. Following postdoctoral appointments at Heriot-Watt, Orsay and Cambridge, he moved to the University of Kent, where he is now Reader in Mathematical Physics. For the past five years, he was an EPSRC Advanced Fellow. He has researched widely on topological solitons, especially multi-soliton solutions and soliton dynamics, and has found surprising relations between different kinds of soliton.

'The authors are two of the most prominent in the field and have made many seminal contributions to it.' Contemporary Physics

• Preface; 1. Introduction; 2. Lagrangians and fields; 3. Topology in field theory; 4. Solitons - general theory; 5. Kinks; 6. Lumps and rational maps; 7. Vortices; 8. Monopoles; 9. Skyrmions; 10. Instantons; 11. Saddle points - sphalerons; References; Index.