Uniton Bundles

Abstract

We show that a twistor construction of Hitchin and Ward can be adapted to study unitons (harmonic spheres in a unitary group). Specifically, we show that unitons are equivalent to holomorphic bundles with extra structure over a rational ruled surface with energy given by Chern class. This equivalence allows us to confirm the conjecture of Wood that unitons are rational. We also construct an example of a two uniton in U(3) using this construction.