Lorenzo Foscolo, Stony Brook University
"Moduli spaces of monopoles and gravitational instantons"
It is well-known that moduli spaces of anti-self-dual (ASD) connections on hyperkähler 4–manifolds are themselves hyperkähler. Using argument from physics, Cherkis and Kapustin suggested that “moduli spaces of solutions to dimensional reductions of the ASD equations are a natural place to look for gravitational instantons”, i.e. complete hyperkähler 4-manifolds with decaying curvature at infinity. The talk will focus on moduli spaces of monopoles with singularities on R3 and R2 × S1 . I will discuss a gluing construction in these two settings and, in the former case, show how it can be exploited to understand the asymptotic geometry of the moduli spaces.