Existence of approximate Hermitian-Einstein structures on semi-stable bundles (Q488059)

The main result of this paper is the following: A holomorphic vector bundle \(E\) over a compact Kähler manifold \(X\) is semi-stable if and only if \(E\) admits an approximate Hermitian-Einstein structure. The result is obtained by proving that \(E\) is semi-stable if and only if for any fixed metric \(H_0\) in \(E\) the Donaldson functional \(M(H_0,H,\omega)\) is bounded from below. In 1987 Kobayashi proved the result for projective manifolds and conjectured the result for general compact Kähler manifolds. The main difficulty in the proof of the general case is that semi-stability implies the lower bound for \(M(H_0,H,\omega)\). The key tool used here is a regularization procedure that generalizes a result of Buchdahl. Applications of the main result are also discussed.