Yang-Mills connections on nonorientable surfaces (Q947306)

\textit{M. F. Atiyah} and \textit{R. Bott} [Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond., A 308, 523--615 (1983; Zbl 0509.14014)] have studied the Yang-Mills functional over a Riemannian surface from the point of view of Morse theory. The current paper generalizes their results to closed, compact, connected, possibly nonorientable surfaces \(\Sigma\). A correspondence between gauge equivalence classes of Yang-Mills-\(G\)-connections on \(\Sigma\) and conjugacy classes of representations \(\Gamma_R(\Sigma)\to G\) ist established, where \(\Gamma_R(\Sigma)\) is the super central extension of \(\pi_1(\Sigma)\). The moduli space of gauge equivalence classes of flat connections on any fixed principal \(G\)-bundle \(P\) over \(\Sigma\) is nonempty and connected if \(\chi(\Sigma)<0\). For the case \(G=U(n)\), the authors give an explicit description of the \(\text{Aut}(P)\)-invariant Morse stratification of the Yang-Mills functional. They compute the Morse index of each stratum, and relate lower strata to top strata of spaces of \(U(m)\)-connections with \(m<n\) on \(\Sigma\) and its orientable double cover.