A Kato-Yau inequality for harmonic spinors and decay estimate for eigenspinors

Abstract

We show that harmonic spinors obey a strengthened version of the well-known pointwise Kato inequality for sections of a vector bundle with a connection. We then prove a decay estimate for eigenspinors using this Kato-Yau estimate and resulting differential inequality. We briefly describe some applications to gauge theory---specifically to integral estimates which are used when gluing and ungluing PU(2) monopoles (math.DG/9907107).