Instanton Calculus and SUSY Gauge Theories on ALE Manifolds

In this letter we report on the computation of instanton-dominated correlation functions in supersymmetric YM theories on ALE spaces. Following the approach of Kronheimer and Nakajima, we explicitly construct the self-dual connection on ALE spaces necessary to perform such computations. We restrict our attention to the simplest case of an $SU(2)$ connection with lowest Chern class on the Eguchi-Hanson gravitational background.

We describe the explicit construction of Yang-Mills instantons on ALE spaces, following the work of Kronheimer and Nakajima. For multicenter ALE metrics, we determine the abelian instanton connections which are needed for the construction in the non-abelian case. We compute the partition function of Maxwell theories on ALE manifolds and comment on the issue of electromagnetic duality. We discuss the topological characterization of the instanton bundles as well as the identifi...

We survey some of the AGT relations between N=2 gauge theories in four dimensions and geometric representations of symmetry algebras of two-dimensional conformal field theory on the equivariant cohomology of their instanton moduli spaces. We treat the cases of gauge theories on both flat space and ALE spaces in some detail, and with emphasis on the implications arising from embedding them into supersymmetric theories in six dimensions. Along the way we construct new toric non...

The results obtained by Seiberg and Witten for the low-energy Wilsonian effective actions of N=2 supersymmetric theories with gauge group SU(2) are in agreement with instanton computations carried out for winding numbers one and two. This suggests that the instanton saddle point saturates the non-perturbative contribution to the functional integral. A natural framework in which corrections to this approximation are absent is given by the topological field theory built out of ...

The analysis in previous publications of the instanton constraints required to produce a finite action of the theory is carried out also for N=2 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory.

We study SYM gauge theories living on ALE spaces. Using localization formulae we compute the prepotential (and its gravitational corrections) for SU(N) supersymmetric ${\cal N}=2, 2^*$ gauge theories on ALE spaces of the $A_n$ type. Furthermore we derive the Poincar\'{e} polynomial describing the homologies of the corresponding moduli spaces of self-dual gauge connections. From these results we extract the ${\cal N}=4$ partition function which is a modular form in agreement...

Instanton calculations are demonstrated from a viewpoint of twisted topological field theory. Various properties become manifest such that perturbative corrections are terminated at one-loop, and norm cancellations occur between bosonic and fermionic excitations in any instanton background. We can easily observe that for a suitable choice of Green functions the infinite dimensional path integration reduces to a finite dimensional integration over a supersymmetric instanton mo...

Paper withdrawn due to a crucial algebraic error in section 3.

We show that the classical equations of motion of the low-energy effective field theory describing the massless modes of the heterotic (or type I) string admit two classes of supersymmetric self--dual backgrounds. The first class, which was already considered in the literature, consists of solutions with a (conformally) flat metric coupled to axionic instantons. The second includes Asymptotically Locally Euclidean (ALE) gravitational instantonic backgrounds coupled to gauge i...

In this paper we prove that over an asymptotically locally flat (ALF) Riemannian four-manifold the energy of an "admissible" SU(2) Yang--Mills is always integer. This result sharpens the previously known energy identity for such Yang--Mills instantons over ALF geometries. Furthermore we demonstrate that this statement continues to hold for the larger gauge group U(2). Finally we make the observation that there might be a natural relationship between 4 dimensional Yang--Mill...