Almost Hermitian structures on moduli spaces of non-Abelian monopoles and applications to the topology of symplectic four-manifolds

Abstract

This work is a sequel to our previous monograph arXiv:2010.15789 (to appear in AMS Memoirs), where we initiated our program to prove that the Bogomolov-Miyaoka-Yau inequality holds for closed, symplectic four-manifolds and, more generally, for closed, smooth four-manifolds with a Seiberg-Witten basic class. This inequality was first proved for compact, complex surfaces of general type independently by Miyaoka and Yau in 1977. Our approach uses a version of Morse theory for a natural Hamiltonian, the square of the $L^2$ norm of the coupled spinors, for the circle action on the moduli space of non-Abelian monopoles over a closed four-manifold. It has the aim of proving the existence of a projectively anti-self-dual connection on a rank-two Hermitian vector bundle over a blow-up of the four-manifold, where the first Pontrjagin number of the vector bundle is negative and greater than or equal to minus the Euler characteristic of the blown-up four-manifold. Our Morse theory argument relies on positivity of virtual Morse-Bott indices for critical points of Hamiltonians for circle actions on complex analytic spaces (or real analytic spaces that, locally, are sufficiently well-approximated by complex analytic model spaces), as developed by the first author in arXiv:2206.14710. In our application to the moduli space of non-Abelian monopoles, the critical points are fixed points of the circle action and thus represented by Seiberg-Witten monopoles.