Yang-Mills flow on special-holonomy manifolds (Q2214072)

Let \((M,g)\) be an oriented Riemannian manifold of dimension \(n\) and \(E\) be a vector bundle over \(M\), with metric \(\langle \cdot, \cdot \rangle\). The set of metric-compatible connections on \(E\) has the structure of an affine space, \({\mathcal A}_E,\) which is modeled on the space of 1-forms valued in the adjoint bundle. The Yang-Mills energy is the functional defined by \[ \varepsilon (A) = \frac 12 \int_M |F_A|^2 dV, \] where \(R_A\) denotes the curvature of \(A \in {\mathcal A}_E\). The negative gradient of the Yang-Mills energy defines a vector field on \({\mathcal A}_E\), whose integral curves correspond to paths of connections \(A(t)\) solving the Yang-Mills equation \(\frac{\partial A}{\partial t} = - D^*_A F_A\), which generates a semi-parabolic flow on \({\mathcal A}_E\), also called Yang-Mills flow. The fixed points of this flow are known as Yang-Mills connections. In the paper the authors study the Yang-Mills flow on Riemannian manifolds with special holonomy \(G_2\) or \(\text{Spin}(7)\). They prove as a main result that, if \(M\) is a compact Riemannian manifold with holonomy contained in \(G_2\) or \(\text{Spin}(7)\), and \(A(t)\) is a smooth solution of the Yang-Mills equation over \(M \times [0, T ),\) with \(T < \infty\), and if in addition \[ \sup_{t < T\\ x \in M} |F_A^7 (x,t) | < \infty \] then the flow extends smoothly beyond time \(T\). The same result holds replacing \(F_A^7\) with \(F_A^{14}\) (in the \(G_2\) case) or \(F_A^{21}\) (in the \(\text{Spin}(7)\) case). In this way they show that a supremum bound on a certain curvature component is sufficient to rule out finite-time singularities and then assuming such a bound, they prove that the singular set at infinite time is an \((n -4)\)-rectifiable, associative (resp. Cayley) subset. Moreover, they study some applications for a variety of dimensional and holonomy reductions of the Yang-Mills equation, determining blow-up criteria for several new parabolic systems related to the Vafa-Witten, Calabi-Yau-monopole, and \(G_2\)-monopole equations.