Casson's invariant and gauge theory (Q915143)

Casson's invariant of homology 3-spheres has attracted much attention recently for it fits in with a variety of ways of producing such invariants, and is probably the simplest. On the one hand Floer theory can be used, and on the other the topological quantum field theory of Witten leads to a description of the invariant. The author's paper here uses the analysis of gauge theories to give a proof that Casson's topological invariant coincides with an analytical one which is an infinite-dimensional generalization of the classical Euler characteristic. The setting for this is the space of connections on the trivial SU(2)-bundle over the 3-manifold M, and the 1-form f defined by \(f_ A(a)=\int_{M}tr(a\wedge F_ A),\) the derivative of the Chern- Simons functional. Using the natural metric on the moduli space of all connections, this defines a vector field whose zeroes occur at the flat connections. Taking as a model the finite-dimensional expression for the Euler characteristic as a sum over the zeroes of a vector field, the author defines an analogous integer. The non-degenerate zeroes of f are shown to be isolated, and one then has to have a local sign to define the Euler characteristic. This is achieved by considering a mod 2 reduction of a spectral flow invariant for an operator which is formally \(\nabla f.\) As usual in the use of gauge theory as a tool for investigating the topology of manifolds, one has to make perturbations of the natural objects to obtain transversality. Here the form f is perturbed by the addition of the derivative of a function obtained by averaging the trace of the holonomy around a family of loops. The corresponding operator then has to be seen to undergo a compact perturbation acting on a suitable Sobolev space. The crux of the proof of the equality of this invariant and Casson's involves the analysis of these operators on three-manifolds with boundary associated to a Heegard decomposition of M. Many of the large number of the technical results necessary to effect the programme are relegated to appendices. These include in particular discussion of the appropriate \(L^ 2\)-theory and invariance under perturbations.