Symplectic Yang-Mills Theory

Abstract

On a symplectic manifold, any differential two-form has a natural decomposition into two components: a primitive part and a non-primitive one. Applying this decomposition to the curvature two-form of a principal bundle over a symplectic manifold, we obtain a natural splitting of the Yang-Mills (YM) functional into two functionals that intrinsically depend on the symplectic structure: the primitive Yang-Mills (PYM) functional and the trace Yang-Mills (TYM) functional. We work out the basic properties of the critical solutions of these two functionals. The PYM functional in particular exhibits many of the desirable properties of the YM functional, including the ellipticity of its Euler-Lagrange equations and an algebraic classification of its flat solutions on G-bundles. We also prove a monotonicity formula for the PYM functional as a first step towards characterizing its moduli space of solutions.