Vafa-Witten Equations and Conformal Geometry

Abstract

In this article, we establish geometric and analytic constraints imposed by the existence of nontrivial solutions to the Vafa-Witten equations on closed 4-manifolds. Using conformal invariance and refined Bochner-type estimates, we first prove an inequality relating the Yamabe constant $Y(g)$ to the $L^{2}$-norm of the self-dual Weyl tensor: $Y(g)\leq 2\sqrt{6}\|W_{g}^{+}\|_{L^2}$; when $Y(g)>0$, this yields a topological lower bound $\int_{M} |W_{g}^{+}|^{2} \geq \frac{4}{3}π^{2}(2χ(M)+3σ(M))$. In the equality case, we show that the manifold must be Kähler with nonnegative scalar curvature and that the connection is reducible. As an application, for positive Einstein manifolds with $\operatorname{Ric}=3g$ admitting an irreducible Vafa-Witten solution, we obtain a sharp volume bound and prove the manifold cannot be Kähler. Through dimensional reduction $S^{1}\times N$, we establish a one-to-one correspondence between stable flat connections on a closed 3-manifold $N$ and $S^{1}$-invariant Vafa-Witten solutions, which yields a new estimate for the Yamabe constant $Y(g_{S^{1}\times N})\leq 2\sqrt{6π}\big(\int_{N}|\operatorname{Ric}(g_{N})-\frac{1}{3} R_{g_{N}}g_{N}|^2\big)^{1/2}$. Finally, under a regularity assumption that every anti-self-dual connection in the compactified moduli space is regular, we prove an energy gap: there exists $\varepsilon(g,P)>0$ such that any Vafa-Witten solution satisfies either $F_{A}^{+}\equiv0$ or $\|F_{A}^{+}\|_{L^{2}}\geq\varepsilon$.