Nonuniqueness for the Yang--Mills heat flow. (Q1864663)

This paper is concerned with Yang-Mills heat flow for a time dependent connection on a principal fiber bundle over a Riemannian \(m\)-dimensional manifold with compact group structure. For the trivial bundle and equivariant solutions this reduces to a flow in one dimensional space with singularity at the origin in time and space. Parabolic rescalings, performed both for \(t>0\) and \(t<0\), transform the problem into one of matching solutions for a couple of ODE's with singularity at the origin. The bulk of the paper lies in a deep analysis of these ODE's, using appropriate change of variables, shooting and asymptotics. It is shown that for \(5\leq m\leq 9\) and every \(n\in{\mathbb N}\) there are solutions defined for \(t<0\) that can be continued to \(t=0\) and \(t>0\) in \(n \) different ways, continuously at \(t=0\) and smoothly for \(t>0\) away from the origin. In addition topological nonuniqueness is obtained for \(m=6\) or 8 in the sense that there are solutions which after the singularity in time may represent connections on a different bundle.