Higgs bundles and four manifolds

Abstract

It is known that the Seiberg-Witten invariants, derived from supersymmetric Yang-Mill theories in four dimensions, do not distinguish smooth structure of certain non-simply-connected four manifolds. We propose generalizations of Donaldson-Witten and Vafa-Witten theories on a Kahler manifold based on Higgs bundles. We showed, in particular, that the partition function of our generalized Vafa-Witten theory can be written as the sum of contributions our generalized Donaldson-Witten invariants and generalized Seiberg-Witten invariants. The resulting generalized Seiberg-Witten invariants might have, conjecturally, information on smooth structure beyond the original Seiberg-Witten invariants for non-simply-connected case. (C) 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.