Blowup formulae in Donaldson-Witten theory and integrable hierarchies

Abstract

We investigate blowup formulae in Donaldson-Witten theory with gauge group SU(N), using the theory of hyperelliptic Kleinian functions. We find that the blowup function is a hyperelliptic sigma-function and we describe an explicit procedure to expand it in terms of the Casimirs of the gauge group up to arbitrary order. As a corollary, we obtain a new expression for the contact terms and we show that the correlation functions involving the exceptional divisor are governed by the KdV hierarchy. We also show that, for manifolds of simple type, the blowup function becomes a tau-function for a multisoliton solution.