Convergence of Yang-Mills-Higgs fields (Q330840)

In this paper, the notion of Yang-Mills-Higgs (YMH) fields is a very general one, since the ``Higgs field'' in this particular concept is a section in a fiber bundle having a compact manifold (with action of the structure group \(G\) as a fiber). As a result, the concept of a Yang-Mills-Higgs fields includes not only Yang-Mills fields, but also (gauged) harmonic maps and twisted holomorphic curves. The base manifold is assumed to be two-dimensional. The paper builds on the same author's [Commun. Contemp. Math. 13, No. 3, 463--486 (2011; Zbl 1220.58006)] where critical points are built with the help of a Sacks-Uhlenbeck type approximation, in which bubble-tree convergence is an important feature. The new aspect in the current paper is a bubbling analysis for a sequence of YMH fields for which the conformal structure of the underlying surface is allowed to vary, and is assumed to converge to a nodal surface in the limit. Away from finitely many points, the sequence of YMH fields converges smoothly. The loss of energy and topology in the limits is completely accounted for by finitely many harmonic spheres which can be interpreted as the ``bubbles'', without necks, but this holds only away from the nodes. For each node, the limit holonomy of the limit connection exists. Near the nodes, however, where the conformal structure degenerates, the YMH fields converge to a pair consisting of a flat connection and a twisted geodesic with potential. The results give a generalized framework for phenomena that have been known in some of the special cases (harmonic maps, twisted holomorphic curves) of YMH fields.