A construction of Spin(7)-instantons

TL;DR

This paper constructs Spin(7)-instantons on compact Spin(7)-manifolds derived from Calabi-Yau four-orbifolds with isolated singularities, using a gluing method starting from Hermitian-Einstein connections on simpler spaces.

Contribution

It introduces a novel gluing technique to construct Spin(7)-instantons on compact manifolds with special holonomy, expanding the understanding of gauge theory in higher dimensions.

Findings

Successfully constructed Spin(7)-instantons on new compact examples.

Provided a simple illustrative example of the construction.

Extended the method of Hermitian-Einstein connections to Spin(7)-instantons.

Abstract

Joyce constructed examples of compact eight-manifolds with holonomy Spin(7), starting with a Calabi-Yau four-orbifold with isolated singular points of a special kind. That construction can be seen as the gluing of ALE Spin(7)-manifolds to each singular point of the Calabi-Yau four-orbifold divided by an anti-holomorphic involution fixing only the singular points. On the other hand, there are higher-dimensional analogues of anti-self-dual instantons in four dimensions on Spin(7)-manifolds, which are called Spin(7)-instantons. They are minimizers of the Yang-Mills action, and the Spin(7)-instanton equation together with a gauge fixing condition forms an elliptic system. In this article, we construct Spin(7)-instantons on the examples of compact Spin(7)-manifolds above, starting with Hermitian-Einstein connections on the Calabi-Yau four-orbifolds and ALE spaces. Under some assumptions on the Hermitian-Einstein connections, we glue them together to obtain Spin(7)-instantons on the compact Spin(7)-manifolds. We also give a simple example of our construction.