Singular points in moduli spaces of Yang-Mills fields

This thesis investigates the metric dependence of the moduli spaces of Yang-Mills fields of an SU(2) principal bundle P with chern number -1 over a four-dimensional, simply-connected, oriented, compact smooth manifold M with positive definite intersection form. The purpose of this investigation is to suggest that the surgery class of the moduli space of irreducible connections is, for a generic metric, a Z2 topological invariant of the smooth structure on M. There are three main parts. The first two parts are local analysis of singular points in the moduli spaces. The last part is global. The first part shows that the set of metrics for which the moduli space of irreducible connections has only non-degenerate singularities has codimension at least one in the space of all metrics. The second part shows that, for a one-parameter family of moduli spaces in a direction transverse to the set of metrics for which the moduli spaces have singularities, passing through a non-degenerate singularity of the simplest type changes the moduli space by a cobordism. The third part shows that generic one-parameter families of metrics give rise to six-dimensional manifolds, the corresponding family of moduli spaces of irreducible connections. It is shown that when M is homeomorphic to S4 the six-dimensional manifold is a proper cobordism, thus establishing the independence of the surgery class of the moduli space on the metric on M