Cartan Connections and Integrable Vortex Equations

We demonstrate that integrable abelian vortex equations on constant curvature Riemann surfaces can be reinterpreted as flat non-abelian Cartan connections. By lifting to three dimensional group manifolds we find higher dimensional analogues of vortices. These vortex configurations are also encoded in a Cartan connection. We give examples of different types of vortex that can be interpreted this way, and compare and contrast this Cartan representation of a vortex with the symmetric instanton representation.