A Kaluza-Klein approach to hyperbolic three-manifolds (Q1825447)

The author develops a new approach to hyperbolic geometry in 3 dimensions and applies it to a number of questions. The main goal is to study ``monopoles'' over such 3-manifolds. These are pairs (A,\(\phi)\) where A is a connection on a principal bundle over the 3-manifold, the Higgs field \(\phi\) is a section of the vector bundle associated to the adjoint representation, and the curvature, F of A is related to the covariant derivative \(\nabla \phi\) of \(\phi\) by the Bogomolny equation \(F=*\nabla \phi.\) The strategy used systematically in this paper is to represent objects over a hyperbolic 3-manifold M by corresponding objects over a compact 4- manifold X which are invariant under a circle action. In the case when M is hyperbolic 3-space the corresponding 4-manifold is the 4-sphere, the case studied by \textit{M. F. Atiyah} [``Magnetic monopoles on hyperbolic spaces'', in: Vector bundles on algebraic varieties, Pap. Colloq., Bombay 1984, Stud. Math., Tata Inst. Fundam. Res. 11, 1-33 (1987)]. In general the circle acts on X with a number of fixed surfaces \(\Sigma_ i\) and \(X\setminus \cup \Sigma_ i\) is \(M\times S^ 1\). (The 4-manifold X has a conformally-flat metric and this is a conformal identification.) All 3- manifolds associated to Kleinian groups without cusps can be obtained in this way. The first application the author gives of these ideas is to the classification of hyperbolic 3-manifolds. Using the division of the conformally flat manifolds into positive, zero, and negative scalar curvature types he shows that if the Hausdorff dimension of the limit set of a geometrically finite Kleinian group (without cusps) is less than 1 then the group is Schottky, while if the dimension is 1 the group is Schottky, Fuchsian or extended Fuchsian. He then goes on to consider the Hodge theory on M and shows that the spaces of \(L^ 2\) harmonic 1-forms and 2-forms on M are isomorphic to the two factors \(H^ 1(M,\partial)\), \(H^ 2(M)\) in \(H^ 2(X)\). The attraction of this approach is that working on the conformal compactification X one sidesteps the analytical difficulties associated to the non-compact manifold M. Turning to monopoles: it is well known that solutions of the Bogomolny equation correspond to invariant Yang-Mills instantons in 4-dimensions, and in this case monopoles over M correspond to \(S^ 1\)-invariant instantons on X. More precisely, to obtain a smooth solution over X one must impose the condition that the norm of the Higgs field \(\phi\) tends to an integer on each boundary component. The author uses the Penrose-Ward twistor correspondence to study the instantons over the 4-manifold X, which correspond to holomorphic bundles over a twistor space Z. The \(S^ 1\) action on X induces a \({\mathbb{C}}^*\) action on Z, and the holomorphic bundle is \({\mathbb{C}}^*\)-invariant. In simple cases the quotient \(Z/{\mathbb{C}}^*\) is a Hausdorff complex surface T, and the monopole corresponds to a holomorphic bundle over T. The author shows how to adapt some of the ``spectral curve'' techniques used by Hitchin in the study of monopoles on \({\mathbb{R}}^ 3\) [\textit{N. J. Hitchin}, Commun. Math. Phys. 83, 579-602 (1982; Zbl 0502.58017)] to his situation. He also produces some explicit solutions to the Bogomolny equations over solid handlebodies, which correspond to 4-manifolds of the form \(S^ 2\times \Sigma\).