Calorons and Constituent Monopoles

Abstract

We study anti-self-dual Yang–Mills instantons on $${\mathbb {R}}^{3}\times S^{1}$$ R 3 × S 1 , also known as calorons, and their behaviour under collapse of the circle factor. In this limit, we make explicit the decomposition of calorons in terms of constituent pieces which are essentially charge 1 monopoles. We give a gluing construction of calorons in terms of the constituents and use it to compute the dimension of the moduli space. The construction works uniformly for structure group an arbitrary compact semi-simple Lie group.