The general caloron correspondence (Q2428146)

The caloron correspondence is about the relation of locally trivial bundles whose fibres are themselves principal bundles and their corresponding frame bundles. This follows the general pattern in differential geometry that the theory of bundles with additional structure in their fibres (e.g. vector bundles) is roughly equivalent to the theory of principal bundles with structure group the automorphism group of this additional structure (e.g. principal \(\text{GL}_n(\mathbb{R})\)-bundles). This perspective is not made explicit in the text (under review) but it helps in understanding the underlying conceptual ideas. In the text the following situation is considered: if \(Q\to X\) is a fixed principal \(G\)-bundle and \(Y\to M\) is a locally trivial fibration with fibre \(X\), then a principal \(G\)-bundle \(\widetilde{P}\to Y\) is said to be of type \(Q\to X\) if the restriction of \(\widetilde{P}\to Y\) to each fibre \(Y_{m}\) is isomorphic to \(Q\to X\). The fibre of the corresponding frame bundle over \(m\in M\) consists of the bundle isomorphisms from \(Q\) to \(\widetilde{P}|_{Y_{m}}\) (over an arbitrary diffeomorphism on the base). This is the same thing as a lift of the frame bundle \(F(Y)\) of \(Y\) (which is a principal \(\text{Diff}(X)\)-bundle over \(M\)) to an \(\text{Aut}(Q)\)-bundle. Note that we are glossing at this point over the fact that \(\text{Aut}(Q)\to \text{Diff}(X)\) might not be surjective. This can also happen for \(X=\mathbb{S}^{1}\) in case that \(G\) is disconnected, in contrast to what is stated in the text. The main result of the first part of the text then is that (equivalence classes of) bundles of type \(Q\to X\) correspond bijectively to (equivalence classes of) lifts of \(F(Y)\to M\) to principal \(\text{Aut}(Q)\)-bundles. The text then develops this correspondence further to the theory of connections on bundles of type \(Q\to X\) and the corresponding frame bundles. At this point the notion of connection has to be fixed, the perspective mentioned would lead naturally to a slightly different notion of connection. In the last two sections the above constructions are used to define characteristic classes for bundles with structure group another group of gauge transformations and to provide explicit formulae for their universal characteristic classes.