On blowup formulae for the S-duality conjecture of Vafa and Witten

Abstract

This is the first part of two papers. In this part, we prove the blowup formulae for virtual Hodge polynomials of Gieseker moduli spaces of rank-2 stable sheaves and Uhlenbeck compactification spaces over algebraic surfaces. In particular, we verify the blowup formulae for the S-duality conjecture of Vafa-Witten, i.e. the blowup formulae for the Euler numbers of instanton moduli spaces over algebraic surfaces.