Quantization of Donaldson's heat flow over projective manifolds (Q269886)

Donaldson's heat flow is a flow \(t\mapsto h(t)\) of Hermitian metrics on a holomorphic vector bundle \(E\) over a projective manifold \(X\). If \(E\) is polystable, then this flow converges to a Hermitian-Einstein metric. In this paper, the authors consider twists \(E(k) := E\otimes L^{\otimes k}\) of \(E\) by powers of an ample holomorphic line bundle \(L \to X\). Set \(N := \dim H^0(X, E(k))\) and let \(r\) be the rank of \(E\). Then for \(k\) large enough, we have an embedding \[ \iota: X \hookrightarrow \mathrm{Gr}(r, H^0(X, E(k))) \cong \mathrm{Gr}(r, N). \] Such an embedding corresponds to a Hermitian inner product \(H\) on \(H^0(X, E(k))\). Every Hermitian metric on \(E\) determines an \(L^2\)-inner product on \(H^0(X, E(k))\) with respect to the Liouville measure of the Kähler form \(\omega\) on \(X\), and a given metric on \(L\). Conversely, a Hermitian inner product \(H\) on \(H^0(X, E(k))\) determines a Hermitian metric \(\mathrm{FS}(H)\) on \(E\) such that \[ \mathrm{Id}_E = \sum_{j=1}^N s_j \otimes s_j^*, \] where \(\{s_1, \ldots, s_N\}\) is an orthonormal basis of \(H^0(X, E(k))\) with respect to \(H\), and \(s_j^*\) is the dual of \(s_j\) with respect to \(\mathrm{FS}(H)\). For such an inner product \(H\), let \(\mu(H) \in \sqrt{-1} \mathfrak{u}(N)\) be defined by \[ \mu(H)_{jk} = (s_j, s_k)_{\mathrm{FS}(H)} \] where \(\{s_1, \ldots, s_N\}\) is an orthonormal basis of \(H^0(X, E(K))\) with respect to \(H\). Set \(n := \dim(X)\). The \textit{normalised balancing flow} is the flow \(t\mapsto H(t)\) of Hermitian inner products on \(H^0(X, E(k))\) defined by fixing \(H(0)\), and \[ \frac{dH(t)}{dt} = -k^{n+1} \int_X \Bigl(\mu(H(t)) - \frac{r \mathrm{vol}(X)}{N}\mathrm{Id} \Bigr) \frac{\omega^{n}}{n!}. \] The main result of this paper is that in the classical limit \(k \to \infty\), solutions of the normalised balancing flow, composed with the map \(\mathrm{FS}\), converge to solutions of Donaldson's heat flow in an appropriate sense. (One needs to either use a modified version of Donaldson's heat flow, or multiply the solutions of the balanced heat flow by a scaling function, but this is made very explicitly.) This leads to an approach to numerically approximate Donaldson's heat flow, which can be hard to evaluate directly due to the appearance of fourth order derivatives of the potential of the metric in the scalar curvature. (The authors kindly pointed out to the reviewer that in this paper, \(F_h = F_{(E, h)}\) denotes the curvature of the Chern connection on a Hermitian holomorphic vector bundle \(E\), and that \(S(\omega)\) is the scalar curvature of the Kähler metric corresponding to \(\omega\).)