Equivariant volumes of non-compact quotients and instanton counting

Abstract

Motivated by Nekrasov's instanton counting, we discuss a method for calculating equivariant volumes of non-compact quotients in symplectic and hyper-Kähler geometry by means of the Jeffrey-Kirwan residue-formula of non-abelian localization. In order to overcome the non-compactness, we use varying symplectic cuts to reduce the problem to a compact setting, and study what happens in the limit that recovers the original problem. We implement this method for the ADHM construction of the moduli spaces of framed Yang-Mills instantons on $\R^{4}$ and rederive the formulas for the equivariant volumes obtained earlier by Nekrasov-Shadchin, expressing these volumes as iterated residues of a single rational function.