Conformally compact and higher conformal Yang-Mills equations

Abstract

On conformally compact manifolds we study Yang-Mills equations, their boundary conditions, formal asymptotics, and Dirichlet-to-Neumann maps. We find that smooth solutions with "magnetic" Dirichlet boundary data are obstructed by a conformally invariant, higher order boundary current. We study the asymptotics of the interior Yang-Mills energy functional and show that the obstructing current is the variation of the conformally invariant coefficient of the first log term in this expansion which is a higher derivative conformally invariant analog of the Yang-Mills energy. The invariant energy is the anomaly for the renormalized interior Yang-Mills functional and its variation gives higher conformal Yang-Mills equations. Global solutions to the magnetic boundary problem determine higher order "electric" Neumann data. This yields the Dirichlet-to-Neumann map. We also construct conformally invariant, higher transverse derivative boundary operators. Acting on interior connections, they give obstructions to solving the Yang-Mills boundary problem, determine the asymptotics of formal solutions, and yield conformally invariant tensors capturing the (non-local) electric Neumann data. We also characterize a renormalized Yang-Mills action functional that encodes global features analogously to the renormalized volume for Poincar\'e-Einstein structures.