  The solitary waves of massive (1+1)-dimensional nonlinear S^N-sigma models
are unveiled. It is shown that the solitary waves in these systems are in
one-to-one correspondence with the separatrix trajectories in the repulsive
N-dimensional Neumann mechanical problem. There are topological (heteroclinic
trajectories) and non-topological (homoclinic trajectories) kinks. The
stability of some embedded sine-Gordon kinks is discussed by means of the
direct estimation of the spectra of the second-order fluctuation operators
around them, whereas the instability of other topological and non-topological
kinks is established applying the Morse index theorem.
