Removable singularities for Yang-Mills connections in higher dimensions. (Q1880049)

The study of singular Yang-Mills fields has become one of the central areas of research in both mathematical and physical gauge theories. After K. Uhlenbeck's pioneering work on removing isolated singularities of Yang-Mills connections on four-manifolds, published more than twenty years ago [\textit{K. K. Uhlenbeck}, Removable singularities in Yang-Mills fields, Commun. Math. Phys. 83, 11--29 (1982; Zbl 0491.58032)], there has been a huge amount of contributions toward the analysis of removable singularities for more general Yang-Mills connections in various dimensions. However, the most general removability theorem for singular Yang-Mills connections in dimension greater than four has not been found yet, although the recent, very fundamental work by \textit{G. Tian} [ Gauge theory and calibrated geometry. I, Ann. Math. (2), 151, No. 1, 193--268 (2000; Zbl 0957.58013)] established some promising guidance in this direction. The paper under review must be seen, in this regard, as a major effort to understand the removable singularities of Yang-Mills fields in higher dimensions, together with the related gauge problems. In fact, using G. Tian's concept of an admissible Yang-Mills connection, and defining removable singularities in a suitable way, the author proves several (local and global), removable singularity theorems for singular Yang-Mills connections on \(G\)-bundles over Riemannian manifolds of dimensions greater than four, and that basically in terms of different boundedness conditions on the respective curvature tensors. The global gauge constructions developed to this end also provide a certain stability result-stating that the existence of a connection with uniformly small curvature tensor already implies the flatness of the underlying \(G\)-bundle. This very substantial paper, written in an utmost clear and thorough style, explores new ground in Yang-Mills theory with remarkable success.