AuthorMoore, John Douglas. author
TitleLectures on Seiberg-Witten Invariants [electronic resource] / by John Douglas Moore
ImprintBerlin, Heidelberg : Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2001
Edition Second Edition
Connect tohttp://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-40952-6
Descript VIII, 121 p. online resource

SUMMARY

Riemannian, symplectic and complex geometry are often studied by means ofsolutions to systems ofnonlinear differential equations, such as the equaยญ tions of geodesics, minimal surfaces, pseudoholomorphic curves and Yangยญ Mills connections. For studying such equations, a new unified technology has been developed, involving analysis on infinite-dimensional manifolds. A striking applications of the new technology is Donaldson's theory of "anti-self-dual" connections on SU(2)-bundles over four-manifolds, which applies the Yang-Mills equations from mathematical physics to shed light on the relationship between the classification of topological and smooth four-manifolds. This reverses the expected direction of application from topology to differential equations to mathematical physics. Even though the Yang-Mills equations are only mildly nonlinear, a prodigious amount of nonlinear analysis is necessary to fully understand the properties of the space of solutions. . At our present state of knowledge, understanding smooth structures on topological four-manifolds seems to require nonlinear as opposed to linear PDE's. It is therefore quite surprising that there is a set of PDE's which are even less nonlinear than the Yang-Mills equation, but can yield many of the most important results from Donaldson's theory. These are the Seiberg-Wittẽ equations. These lecture notes stem from a graduate course given at the University of California in Santa Barbara during the spring quarter of 1995. The objective was to make the Seiberg-Witten approach to Donaldson theory accessible to second-year graduate students who had already taken basic courses in differential geometry and algebraic topology


SUBJECT

  1. Mathematics
  2. Algebra
  3. Algebraic geometry
  4. Global analysis (Mathematics)
  5. Manifolds (Mathematics)
  6. System theory
  7. Calculus of variations
  8. Algebraic topology
  9. Mathematics
  10. Algebra
  11. Algebraic Topology
  12. Calculus of Variations and Optimal Control; Optimization
  13. Global Analysis and Analysis on Manifolds
  14. Systems Theory
  15. Control
  16. Algebraic Geometry