Magnetic monopoles on three-manifolds (Q581854)

The author of this paper draws on the analytical techniques developed by Taubes, Uhlenbeck, Donaldson and others for the study of instantons on compact 4-manifolds to study magnetic monopoles on certain non-compact 3- manifolds. The 3-manifolds M involved are those such that the product metric on \(M\times S^ 1\) admits a conformal compactification to a 4- manifold with a circle action whose fixed-point set consists of a disjoint union of surfaces - the boundary of the manifold M. The model for this which is carefully analyzed [\textit{M. F. Atiyah}, ``Magnetic monopoles in hyperbolic spaces'', Vector bundles on algebraic varieties, Pap. Colloq., Bombay 1984, Stud. Math., Tata Inst. Fundam. Res. 11, 1-33 (1987)], is where M is hyperbolic 3-space \(H^ 3\), compactified to \(S^ 4\) by adding a 2-sphere. This example, together with \(M=S^ 2\times {\mathbb{R}}\), compactified to \(S^ 2\times S^ 2\) are continually treated as examples for the various theorems in the paper. The theorems themselves concerns existence and the structure and dimension of moduli spaces and their compactifications. A large class of examples consists of taking quotients of \(H^ 3\) by a geometrically finite group without cusps, considered by the same author [\textit{P. J. Braam}, Enseign. Math., II. Sér. 34, No.3/4, 275-311 (1988)]. The methods are, however, essentially compact and 4-dimensional together with the \(S^ 1\)-equivariance property. A different treatment of monopoles on 3-manifolds with different asymptotic properties which depends on non- compact analysis may be found in [\textit{A. Floer}, Bull. Am. Math. Soc. 16, 125-127 (1987; Zbl 0669.53022)].