Mathematics Colloquia and Seminars

Return to Colloquia & Seminar listing

Yang-Mills Instantons in Curved Backgrounds from String Theory

Mathematical Physics Seminar

Speaker: Sergey Cherkis, Dublin
Location: 3240 MSB
Start time: Thu, Jan 7 2010, 12:10PM

A Yang-Mills instanton is a connections with the self-dual curvature on a vector bundle over a four-manifold. Instantons play an important role in differential geometry and physics. Since the original construction of Atiyah, Drinfeld, Hitchin, and Manin of instantons on flat space it was generalized in a number of ways by Kronheimer and Nakajima and by Nahm. All of these generalizations are restricted to base spaces that are flat or have a flat orbifold limit. Through a series of string theory dualities we obtain a general construction for instantons on essentially curved ALF spaces. For the case of instanton number one, it allows us to find the explicit metrics on their moduli space as well as the explicit instanton connection.