Morse theory for the Yang-Mills functional via equivariant homotopy theory

We revisit Atiyah and Bott's study of Morse theory for the Yang-Mills functional over a Riemann surface, and establish new formulas for the minimum codimension of a (non-semi-stable) stratum. These results yield the exact connectivity of the natural map (C_{min} E)//G(E) --> Map^E (M, BU(n)) from the homotopy orbits of the space of central Yang-Mills connections to the classifying space of the gauge group G(E). All of these results carry over to non-orientable surfaces via Ho...

In this paper we complete the proof of the existence of multiple solutions (and, in particular, non minimal ones), to the epsilon-Dirichlet problem obtained as a variational problem for the SU(2)-epsilon-Yang Mills functional. This is equivalent to proving the existence of multiple solutions to the Dirichlet problem for the SU(2)-Yang Mills functional with small boundary data. In the first paper of this series this non-compact variational problem is transformed into the finit...

We lay the foundations of a Morse homology on the space of connections on a principal $G$-bundle over a compact manifold $Y$, based on a newly defined gauge-invariant functional $\mathcal J$. While the critical points of $\mathcal J$ correspond to Yang-Mills connections on $P$, its $L^2$-gradient gives rise to a novel system of elliptic equations. This contrasts previous approaches to a study of the Yang-Mills functional via a parabolic gradient flow. We carry out the complet...

In this paper we give an overview of different Morse-theoretic methods used to study the topology of moduli spaces of Higgs bundles.

Here we prove the necessary analytic results to construct a Morse theory for the Yang-Mills-Higgs functional on the space of Higgs bundles over a compact Riemann surface. The main result is that the gradient flow with initial conditions $(A'', \phi)$ converges to a critical point of this functional, the isomorphism class of which is given by the graded object associated to the Harder-Narasimhan-Seshadri filtration of $(A'', \phi)$. In particular, the results of this paper sho...

We study the $L^2$ gradient flow of the Yang--Mills functional on the space of connection 1-forms on a principal $G$-bundle over the sphere $S^2$ from the perspective of Morse theory. The resulting Morse homology is compared to the heat flow homology of the space $\Omega G$ of based loops in the compact Lie group $G$. An isomorphism between these two Morse homologies is obtained by coupling a perturbed version of the Yang--Mills gradient flow with the $L^2$ gradient flow of t...

In this paper we explain how Morse theory for the Yang-Mills functional can be used to prove an analogue, for surface groups, of the Atiyah-Segal theorem. Classically, the Atiyah-Segal theorem relates the representation ring R(\Gamma) of a compact Lie group $\Gamma$ to the complex K-theory of the classifying space $B\Gamma$. For infinite discrete groups, it is necessary to take into account deformations of representations, and with this in mind we replace the representation r...

We use Morse theory of the Yang-Mills functional to compute the Betti numbers of the moduli stack of flat U(3)-bundles over a compact nonorientable surface. Our result establishes the antiperfection conjecture of Ho-Liu, and provides evidence for the equivariant formality conjecture of the author.

A Morse 2-function is a generic smooth map from a manifold M of arbitrary finite dimension to a surface B. Its critical set maps to an immersed collection of cusped arcs in B. The aim of this paper is to explain exactly when it is possible to move these arcs around in B by a homotopy and to give a library of examples when M is a closed 4-manifold. The last two sections give applications to the theory of crown diagrams of smooth 4-manifolds.

It is known that there is a bijection between the perturbed closed geodesics, below a given energy level, on the moduli space of flat connections M and families of perturbed Yang-Mills connections depending on a small parameter. In this paper we study the heat flow on the loop space on M and the Yang-Mills L^2-flows for a 3-manifold N with partial rescaled metrics. Our main result is that the bounded Morse homology of the loop space on M is isomorphic to the bounded Morse hom...