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  • © 2001

Lectures on Seiberg-Witten Invariants

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Mathematics (LNM, volume 1629)

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Table of contents (3 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-viii
  2. Preliminaries

    Pages 1-44
  3. Back Matter

    Pages 117-121

About this book

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.

Keywords

  • Characteristic class
  • Clifford algebras
  • Dirac operators
  • Hodge theory
  • Seiberg-Witten invariants
  • algebra
  • four-manifolds
  • vector bundle

Authors and Affiliations

  • Department of Mathematics, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

    John Douglas Moore

Bibliographic Information

Buying options

eBook USD 34.99
Price excludes VAT (Canada)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book USD 44.99
Price excludes VAT (Canada)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions