Yang-Mills heat flow on gauged holomorphic maps (Q344366)

A gauged holomorphic map is a pair consisting of a connection in a principal \(K\)-bundle and a section of an associated fiber bundle that is holomorphic with respect to the connection. If such a gauged holomorphic map is a zero of a suitable Yang-Mills functional, it is called a vortex. The base manifold is assumed here to be a Riemannian surface, possibly with boundary. The fiber of the fiber bundle is a compact Kähler Hamiltonian \(K\)-manifold or a vector space with linear \(K\)-action. An obvious attempt to find vortices would be to follow the gradient flow lines of the Yang-Mills functional on the space of gauged holomorphic maps. They can converge to a zero of the functional, but more generally would be expected to approach a critical point. One of the main results is that the flow exists for all times and indeed converges to a critical point, modulo ``bubbling off'' of spheres which results from energy concentrating in isolated points. If the base manifold has a nonempty boundary, the flow limit is a vortex. The same holds for a closed base manifold if the flow is started with initial data of sufficiently small energy. A pleasing aspect for the analyst is the great care that is invested in describing the Sobolev spaces adapted to the geometric setting of the paper.