\(SO\)(3) monopoles, level-one Seiberg--Witten moduli spaces, and Witten's conjecture in low degrees (Q1862054)

Let \({\mathbf D}(h)\) be the SO(3)-Donaldson series of a smooth 4-manifold \(X\) where \(h\in H_2(X,{\mathbb R})\), and \({\mathbf {SW}}(h)\) be the Seiberg-Witten series. Under some mild conditions on \(X\), the authors prove the Witten conjecture that the Donaldson and Seiberg-Witten series are the same, modulo a power of \(h\). Namely if \(X\) is Seiberg-Witten simple type, then \[ \begin{aligned} {\mathbf D}(h)&\equiv{\mathbf{SW}}(h)\equiv 0 \bmod h^{c-2},\\ {\mathbf D}(h) &\equiv 2^{2-c}e^{h\cdot h/2}{\mathbf {SW}}(h)\bmod h^{c+2}, \end{aligned} \] where \(c=-(7\chi+11\sigma)/4\). The authors apply the gluing techniques to compute the contributions from the Seiberg-Witten moduli spaces lying in the first level (one-bubble) of the Uhlenbeck compactification of the SO(3)-monopole moduli space. By allowing more bubbles, they intend to prove the equivalence modulo any powers of \(h\), thus completely verifying the Witten conjecture.