Global existence and convergence of solutions to gradient systems and applications to Yang-Mills gradient flow

Abstract: In this monograph, we develop results on global existence and convergence of solutions to abstract gradient flows on Banach spaces for a potential function that obeys the Lojasiewicz-Simon gradient inequality. We prove a Lojasiewicz-Simon gradient inequality for the Yang-Mills energy functional over closed, smooth Riemannian manifolds of arbitrary dimension and apply the resulting framework to prove new results for the gradient flow equation for the Yang-Mills energy functional on a principal bundle, with compact Lie structure group, over a closed, smooth Riemannian manifolds, including the following. If the initial connection is close enough to a local minimum of the Yang-Mills energy functional, in a norm sense when the base manifold has arbitrary dimension or in an energy sense when the base manifold has dimension four, then the Yang-Mills gradient flow exists for all time and converges to a Yang-Mills connection. If the initial connection is allowed to have arbitrary energy but we restrict to the setting of a Hermitian vector bundle over a compact, complex, Hermitian (but not necessarily Kaehler) surface and the initial connection has curvature of type (1,1), then the Yang-Mills gradient flow exists for all time, though bubble singularities may (and in certain cases must) occur in the limit as time tends to infinity.