Calorons and constituent monopoles (Q6076995)

The aim of this paper is to study anti-self-dual Yang-Mills instantons on the flat model \(\mathbb{R}^3\times S^1\) (where the circle has radius \(\epsilon\rightarrow0\)), also known as calorons, and their behaviour under codimension-1 collapse of the circle factor. In this limit, the authors make explicit the decomposition of calorons in terms of constituent pieces which are essentially charge 1 monopoles. They give a gluing construction for families of calorons in terms of the constituents and use it to compute the dimension of the moduli space. The construction works uniformly for structure group an arbitrary compact semi-simple Lie group. The construction can be qualitatively described as superpositions of building blocks localised around points in the collapsed limit \(\mathbb{R}^3\), glued into a singular \(S^1\)-invariant abelian background obtained from a sum of Dirac monopoles. All the calorons produced have maximal symmetry breaking at infinity, i.e., the centraliser of the holonomy around circles \(\{x\}\times S^1\) for \(|x|\gg1\) is a maximal torus in the structure group \(G\). The approximation in terms of simpler building blocks is increasingly accurate as \(\epsilon\rightarrow0\) and the authors expect their construction captures some generic behaviour of instantons under codimension-1 collapse. The paper is organized as follows: Section 1 is an introduction to the subject and a statement of results. Section 2 is devoted to boundary conditions and topological invariants. In this brief preliminary section the authors fix the notation and conventions that will be used throughout the paper and explain the asymptotics and topological invariants of a caloron. Section 3 gives the definition of fundamental calorons. The authors introduce the simple model solutions that will be used as building blocks in the construction of more complicated calorons. These fundamental calorons are all obtained from the simplest non-abelian solution of the Bogomolny equation on \(\mathbb{R}^3\), the charge 1 BPS (Bogomolny-Prasad-Sommerfield) \(SU(2)\) monopole. Section 4 deals with approximate solutions. The authors show how to construct approximate calorons by gluing together Dirac monopoles and fundamental calorons. The idea of the obtained result is to build a caloron by gluing the fundamental solutions of the previous section into a singular background configuration. Here, the authors describe this singular background and then use fundamental calorons to produce a smooth connection that satisfies the self-duality equations only in an approximate sense. Section 5 provides all of the linear analysis results that the authors need to study and deform their approximate calorons to an exact solutions (in order to obtain uniform estimates, all the analysis is carried out in appropriate weighted Hölder spaces). They collect some fundamental results about mapping properties of the linear operators appearing in the deformation theory of calorons and in particular study dependence of constants on when they couple these operators to the approximate caloron of the previous section. The proof of the main existence theorem is completed in Section 6 and the dimension formula is given in Section 7.