Talk page

Title:
The Yang-Mills-Higgs Flow in the Neighbourhood of a Critical Point

Speaker:
Graeme Wilkin

Abstract:
The Yang-Mills-Higgs flow was originally studied by Simpson in the context of constructing Hermitian-Einstein metrics on Higgs bundles. Methods of Donaldson and Simpson show that the Yang-Mills-Higgs flow resembles a nonlinear heat equation on the space of Hermitian metrics on the bundle and therefore the downwards flow is well-behaved with respect to existence and uniqueness, and it also has nice smoothing properties. On the other hand, the upwards flow is ill-posed and therefore even existence of solutions is problematic.

Link:
http://scgp.stonybrook.edu/video_portal/video.php?id=2714

Workshop:
Simons- Workshop: New perspectives on Higgs bundles, branes and quantization