Morse theory for the Yang-Mills energy function near flat connections

arXiv1906.03954MaRDI QIDQ6503453FDOQ6503453

Authors: Paul M. N. Feehan 

Abstract: A result (Corollary 4.3) in an article by Uhlenbeck (1985) asserts that the $W^{1,p}$-distance between the gauge-equivalence class of a connection $A$ and the moduli subspace of flat connections $M(P)$ on a principal $G$-bundle $P$ over a closed Riemannian manifold $X$ of dimension $dgeq2$ is bounded by a constant times the $L^p$ norm of the curvature, $|F_A{|}_{L^p(X)}$, when $G$ is a compact Lie group, $F_A$ is $L^p$-small, and $p>d/2$. While we prove that this estimate holds when the Yang-Mills energy function on the space of Sobolev connections is Morse-Bott along the moduli subspace $M(P)$ of flat connections, it does not hold when the Yang-Mills energy function fails to be Morse-Bott, such as at the product connection in the moduli space of flat $mathrmSU(2)$ connections over a real two-dimensional torus. However, we prove that a useful modification of Uhlenbeck's estimate always holds provided one replaces $|F_A{|}_{L^p(X)}$ by a suitable power $|F_A{|}_{L^p(X)}^{l}ambda$, where the positive exponent $lambda$ reflects the structure of non-regular points in $M(P)$. The proof of our refinement involves gradient flow and Morse theory for the Yang-Mills energy function on the quotient space of Sobolev connections and a Lojasiewicz distance inequality for the Yang-Mills energy function. A special case of our estimate, when $X$ has dimension four and the connection $A$ is anti-self-dual, was proved by Fukaya (1998) by entirely different methods. Lastly, we prove that if $A$ is a smooth Yang-Mills connection with small enough energy, then $A$ is necessarily flat.

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Morse-Smale systems (37D15) Yang-Mills and other gauge theories in mechanics of particles and systems (70S15) Yang-Mills and other gauge theories in quantum field theory (81T13) Applications of global analysis to structures on manifolds (57R57) Moduli problems for differential geometric structures (58D27) Variational problems concerning extremal problems in several variables; Yang-Mills functionals (58E15)

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