An SO(3)-monopole cobordism formula relating Donaldson and Seiberg-Witten invariants

Abstract

We prove an analogue of the Kotschick-Morgan conjecture in the context of SO(3) monopoles, obtaining a formula relating the Donaldson and Seiberg-Witten invariants of smooth four-manifolds using the SO(3)-monopole cobordism. The main technical difficulty in the SO(3)-monopole program relating the Seiberg-Witten and Donaldson invariants has been to compute intersection pairings on links of strata of reducible SO(3) monopoles, namely the moduli spaces of Seiberg-Witten monopoles lying in lower-level strata of the Uhlenbeck compactification of the moduli space of SO(3) monopoles [arXiv:dg-ga/9710032]. In this monograph, we prove --- modulo a gluing theorem which is an extension of our earlier work in [arXiv:math/9907107] --- that these intersection pairings can be expressed in terms of topological data and Seiberg-Witten invariants of the four-manifold. This conclusion is analogous to the Kotschick-Morgan conjecture concerning the wall-crossing formula for Donaldson invariants of a four-manifold with $b_2^+=1$; that wall-crossing formula and the resulting structure of Donaldson invariants for four-manifolds with $b_2^+=1$ were established, assuming the Kotschick-Morgan conjecture, by Goettsche [arXiv:alg-geom/9506018] and Goettsche and Zagier [arXiv:alg-geom/9612020]. In this monograph, we reduce the proof of the Kotschick-Morgan conjecture to an extension of previously established gluing theorems for anti-self-dual SO(3) connections (see [arXiv:math/9812060] and references therein). Since the first version of our monograph was circulated, applications of our results have appeared in the proof of Property P for knots by Kronheimer and Mrowka [arXiv:math/0311489] and work of Sivek on Donaldson invariants for symplectic four-manifolds [arXiv:1301.0377].