The Yang-Mills \(\alpha\)-flow in vector bundles over four manifolds and its applications (Q2339705)

The paper introduces Yang-Mills \(\alpha\)-flow, which is the ``negative gradient flow'' of a regularized Yang-Mills functional \[ YM_\alpha(A)=\int_M(1+|F_A|^2)^\alpha\,dV\,. \] The regularization is modeled on the Sacks-Uhlenbeck \(\alpha\)-regularization of the Dirichlet energy, and \(YM_\alpha\), like its prototype, satisfies the Palais-Smale condition for \(\alpha>1\), which both original functionals fail due to conformal invariance. There are two main results. First, for any smooth initial connection there is a unique global smooth solution \(A_\alpha(x,t)\) to the \(\alpha\)-flow for \(\alpha-1\) sufficiently small. Moreover, passing to a subsequence \(A_\alpha(x,t)\) converges to a limiting connection when \(t\to\infty\) (Schabrun recently proved that the limit exists without subsequencing). Second, when \(\alpha\to1\) this solution converges to a weak solution to the Yang-Mills flow outside a singular set, which is at most finite for any fixed \(t\). Up to gauge transformations the convergence is smooth on any compact subset disjoint from the singularities. This provides a new proof of Struwe's result on global existence of a weak solution to the Yang-Mills flow. Struwe's approach is modified because the \(L^4\) norms of curvature and its derivatives come into play for the \(\alpha\)-flow, forcing the authors to pass to a gauge equivalent flow. If a blow-up occurs in finite time the authors show that after it the solution lives in a new bundle, related to the original by taking connected sums with bubbling bundles over \(S^4\). Several applications of the results are given. For example, if \(G\) is a free Abelian group of rank \(r\) then there exist at least \(r\) distinct Yang-Mills \(G\) connections over \(S^4\). This is non-trivial for semi-simple compact Lie groups like \(SO(4)\). The paper also reproves the Sibner-Sibner-Uhlenbeck result on the existence of a non-minimal Yang-Mills connection over \(S^4\). Finally, the authors strengthen Sedlacek's result on weak convergence of minimizing sequences away from finitely many points. Sedlacek's limit connection extends to a Yang-Mills connection on a possibly new bundle with somewhat obscure relation to the original. The authors show that by gauge transforming the minimizing sequence one can obtain smooth convergence instead of the weak one, and the new bundle is related to the original via finitely many bubble bundles over \(S^4\).