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• CommentRowNumber1.
• CommentAuthorUrs
• CommentTimeAug 26th 2011

added to Yang-Mills instanton a discussion of instantons as tunnelings between Chern-Simons vacua.

• CommentRowNumber2.
• CommentAuthorUrs
• CommentTimeAug 27th 2011

I have further expanded at Yang-Mills instanton the discussion, adding full detail to the statement about gradient flow (making the Hodge metric on forms and the respective gradient of the Chern-Simons functional fully manifest)

• CommentRowNumber3.
• CommentAuthorUrs
• CommentTimeSep 7th 2019

• CommentRowNumber4.
• CommentAuthorTodd_Trimble
• CommentTimeNov 17th 2019

My eyes lighted on this. I don’t have a vested interest, but the theory of Yang-Mills instantons as set out in the nLab reads as if a correction to, in fact a complete reworking of, the usual story as told in textbooks, and I’m just wondering whether all this is original research of Urs with some contributions by a few others like Igor Khavkine and David Roberts (looking at the history of the article). It’s a little hard to tell from the article what is due to whom.

• CommentRowNumber5.
• CommentAuthorUrs
• CommentTimeNov 17th 2019
• (edited Nov 17th 2019)

Thanks, Todd.

Just to say that this is all written by me. Checking the history, David R. And Igor K. made trivial edits in this case (adding a cross-link and a doi-link to the references). Also, the bulk of the entry is actually !include-ed from SU2-instantons from the correct maths to the traditional physics story. (I had split that off as an include-file in order to be able to use it also in other entries related to instantons.)

I would want to believe that most mathematical physicists, when pressed would produce this explanation of instanton sectors. But when I was digging into the literature to find good citations, I didn’t find any. Which is why I ended up writing down this account.

• CommentRowNumber6.
• CommentAuthorUrs
• CommentTimeNov 17th 2019

(In retrospect, this discussion of instantons via the one-point compactification eventually led to the discussion in Equivariant Cohomotopy implies orientifold tadpole cancellation.)

• CommentRowNumber7.
• CommentAuthorUrs
• CommentTimeOct 19th 2020

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