Uniton bundles (Q1911807)

This paper develops a twistor construction of Hitchin and Ward to the study of unitons (harmonic spheres in a unitary group). It is shown that unitons are equivalent to holomorphic bundles with extra structure over a rational ruled surface with energy given by Chern class. This equivalence is then used to confirm the conjecture of Wood that unitons are rational. More recent work of the same author derives from this a closed-form expression for the general solution in terms of monad data, and resolves a number of issues raised in this paper, including the interpretation of the uniton number. Work in progress extends this construction to treat the soliton equations of \textit{R. S. Ward} [Commun. Math. Phys. 128, No. 2, 319-332 (1990; Zbl 0707.32007)] which generalise these harmonic map equations to three-dimensional space-time. One result of this is that the analysis required in this paper can be simplified.