Limiting properties of certain geometric flows in complex geometry

Abstract

In this thesis, we study convergence results of certain non-linear geometric flows on vector bundles over complex manifolds. First we consider the case of a semi-stable vector bundle E over a compact Kahler manifold X of arbitrary dimension. We show that in this case Donaldson's functional is bounded from below. This allows us to construct an approximate Hermitian-Einstein structure on E along the Donaldson heat flow, generalizing a classic result of Kobayashi for projective manifolds to the Kahler case. Next we turn to general unstable bundles. We show that along a solution of the Yang-Mills flow, the trace of the curvature approaches in L2 an endomorphism with constant eigenvalues given by the slopes of the quotients from the Harder-Narasimhan filtration of E. This proves a sharp lower bound for the Hermitian-Yang-Mills functional and thus the Yang-Mills functional, generalizing to arbitrary dimension a formula of Atiyah and Bott first proven on Riemann surfaces. Furthermore, we show any reflexive extension to all of X of the limiting bundle is isomorphic to the double dual of the graded quotients from the Harder-Narasimhan-Seshadri filtration, verifying a conjecture of Bando and Siu. Our work on semi-stable bundles plays an important part of this result. For the final section of this thesis, we show that, in the case where X is an arbitrary Hermitian manifold equipped with a Gauduchon metric, given a stable Higgs bundle the Donaldson heat flow converges along a subsequence of times to a Hermitian-Einstein connection. This allows us to extend to the non-Kahler case the correspondence between stable Higgs bundles and (possibly) non-unitary Hermitian-Einstein connections first proven by Simpson on Kahler manifolds.