Global existence for the Seiberg-Witten flow (Q641513)

The authors introduce the gradient flow of the Seiberg-Witten functional on a compact, orientable Riemannian four-manifold \(M\). They prove that, for any given smooth \((\varphi_{0}, A_{0})\), the system \[ \begin{aligned} \frac{\partial\varphi}{\partial t} & = - \nabla_{A}^{*}\nabla_{A}\varphi - \frac{1}{4}\left(S + |\varphi|^{2}\right)\varphi,\\ \frac{\partial A}{\partial t} & = - d^{*}F_{A} - i\, \text{Im}\langle\nabla_{A}\varphi, \varphi\rangle,\end{aligned} \] where \(F_{A}= dA\) is the curvature of the line bundle connection \(A\), admits a unique global smooth solution on \(M\times [0, \infty)\) with initial data \((\varphi_{0}, A_{0})\). Moreover, as \(t\to \infty\), the solution \((\varphi(t), A(t))\) converges smoothly to a limit \((\varphi_{\infty}, A_{\infty})\) that is unique up to gauge transformations, and \((\varphi_{\infty}, A_{\infty})\) is a smooth solution of the equations \[ \begin{aligned} 0 & = - \nabla_{A}^{*}\nabla_{A}\varphi - \frac{1}{4}\left(S + |\varphi|^{2}\right)\varphi,\\ 0& = - d^{*}F_{A} - i\, \text{Im}\langle\nabla_{A}\varphi, \varphi\rangle. \end{aligned} \] There are constants \(C_{k}\) and \(\frac{1}{2}< \gamma < 1\) such that \[ \| (\varphi(t), A(t))- (\varphi_{\infty}, A_{\infty})\|_{H^{k}}\leq C_{k}t^{-(1-\gamma)/(2\gamma-1)}. \]