1.

Record Nr.

UNISA996466535003316

Autore

Moore John D

Titolo

Lectures on Seiberg-Witten Invariants [[electronic resource] /] / by John D. Moore

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berlin, Heidelberg : , : Springer Berlin Heidelberg : , : Imprint : Springer, , 2001

ISBN

3-540-40952-1

Edizione

[2nd ed. 2001.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (VIII, 121 p.)

Collana

Lecture Notes in Mathematics, , 0075-8434 ; ; 1629

Classificazione

58E15

Disciplina

510 s

514/.74

Soggetti

Algebra

Algebraic topology

Calculus of variations

Global analysis (Mathematics)

Manifolds (Mathematics)

System theory

Algebraic geometry

Algebraic Topology

Calculus of Variations and Optimal Control; Optimization

Global Analysis and Analysis on Manifolds

Systems Theory, Control

Algebraic Geometry

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Sommario/riassunto

Riemannian, symplectic and complex geometry are often studied by means ofsolutions to systems ofnonlinear differential equations, such as the equa­ tions of geodesics, minimal surfaces, pseudoholomorphic curves and Yang­ 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-Witte~ 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.