Anti-self-dual instantons with Lagrangian boundary conditions II: Bubbling

Abstract

We study bubbling phenomena of anti-self-dual instantons on $\H^2\times\S$, where $\S$ is a closed Riemann surface. The restriction of the instanton to each boundary slice $\{z\}\times\S$, $z\in\pd\H^2$ is required to lie in a Lagrangian submanifold of the moduli space of flat connections over $\S$ that arises from the restrictions to the boundary of flat connections on a handle body. We establish an energy quantization result for sequences of instantons with bounded energy near $\{0\}\times\S$: Either their curvature is in fact uniformly bounded in a neighbourhood of that slice (leading to a compactness result) or there is a concentration of some minimum quantum of energy. We moreover obtain a removable singularity result for instantons with finite energy in a punctured neighbourhood of $\{0\}\times\S$. This completes the analytic foundations for the construction of an instanton Floer homology for 3-manifolds with boundary. This Floer homology is an intermediate object in the program proposed by Salamon for the proof of the Atiyah-Floer conjecture for homology-3-spheres. In the interior case, for anti-self-instantons on $\R^2\times\S$, our methods provide a new approach to the removable singularity theorem by Sibner-Sibner for codimension 2 singularities with a holonomy condition.