规范理论从物理几何.pdfVIP

Rend. Istit. Mat. Univ. Trieste Volume 42 (2010), 103–128. Gauge Theory: from Physics to Geometry1 Ugo Bruzzo Abstract. Maxwell theory may be regarded as a prototype of gauge theory and generalized to nonabelian gauge theory. We briefly sketch the history of gauge theories, from Maxwell to Yang-Mills theory, and the identification of gauge fields with connections on fibre bundles. We introduce the notion of instanton and consider the moduli spaces of such objects. Finally, we discuss some modern techniques for studying the topology of these moduli spaces. Keywords: Gauge Theory, Instantons, Moduli Spaces, Instanton Counting. MS Classification 2010: 14D20, 14D21, 14J60, 32G13, 58D27, 70S15, 81T45 1. Introduction The title of a famous paper by Eugene Wigner, “The unreasonable effective- ness of mathematics in the natural sciences” [56], has by now become almost a commonplace. Here I would like to turn it upside-down, and make it into “the unreasonable effectiveness of nature in teaching us mathematics”. There have been indeed remarkable instances where physical theories have provided formidable input to mathematicians, offering the stimulus to the creation of new mathematical theories, and supplying strong evidence for highly nontrivial the- orems. A striking example of this new kind of interaction between mathematics 1This paper is an elaboration of the contents of a talk given in a meeting in occasion of the 40th anniversary of Rendiconti dell’Istituto di Matematica dell’Universit`a di Trieste. I thank the organizers of the meeting for their invitation, and Claudio Bartocci for a useful conversa- tion about the development of gauge theory. I also thank Giuseppe Bruzzaniti for reading the manuscript and for helping