Hyperkähler cones and instantons on quaternionic Kähler manifolds (Q2006972)

In this paper a new method to construct Yang-Mills instantons over quaternionic pseudo-Riemannian Kähler manifolds is introduced by extending a technique motivated by supersymmetry for constructing Yang-Mills instantons over pseudo-Riemannian hyper-Kähler manifods by the same authors. By a \textit{quaternionic pseudo-Riemannian Kähler manifold} of signature \((p,q)\) one means a real \(4n\)-dimensional pseudo-Riemannian manifold \((M,g)\) whose holonomy group is isomorphic to \(\mathrm{Sp}(1)\mathrm{Sp}(p,q)\) satisfying \(p+q=n\). Such manifolds are automatically Einstein hence solving the Yang-Mills self-duality equations over them is interesting from both a mathematical and a physical viewpoint. The authors' method in the spirit of the classical Atiyah-Ward correspondence rests on a bijection between gauge equivalence classes of Yang-Mills instantons with arbitrary compact structure group \(G\) over \((M,g)\) and certain holomorphic objects over a twistor space-like complex manifold \(H(S(M))\) associated to \((M,g)\). This twistor space is constructed in two steps. First, given \((M,g)\) one takes the so-called \textit{Swann bundle} over \(M\), i.e., a certain \({\mathbb H}^*/{\mathbb Z}_2\)-bundle \(\pi :S(M)\rightarrow M\). It has the structure of a hyper-Kähler cone over \(M\). Secondly, one considers its \textit{harmonic space} \(H(S(M))\) which is a topologically trivial \(\mathrm{SL}(2;{\mathbb C})\)-bundle over \(S(M)\) carrying the unique non-product complex structure which makes \(H(S(M))\) a holomorphic bundle over the classical twistor space \(Z(S(M))=S(M)\times{\mathbb C}P^1\) of the Swann bundle; the fibers of this vector bundle are isomorphic to the Borel subgroup \(B\subset\mathrm{SL}(2;{\mathbb C})\) since \(\mathrm{SL}(2;{\mathbb C})/B\cong{\mathbb C}P^1\). The key observation is that there is a one-to-one correspondence between (local) \(G\)-instantons over \((M,g)\) and certain (local) holomorphic maps, called (supersymmetric) \textit{prepotentials}, from \(H(S(M))\) into the complexified Lie algebra of \(G\). Combining this method with results of Narasimhan and Ramanan the construction settles down to a set of data on certain local maps \(M\supset U\rightarrow \mathrm{Mat}_{k\times m} ({\mathbb C})\) and in this form the construction resembles the classical ADHM construction.