The Yang-Mills heat equation on compact manifolds with boundary.

The Yang-Mills heat equation is the gradient flow corresponding to the Yang-Mills functional. It was initially introduced by S. K. Donaldson to study the existence of irreducible Yang-Mills connections on the projective plane. In this talk, we will consider this equation over compact three-manifolds with boundary. It is a nonlinear weakly parabolic equation, but we will see how one can prove long-time existence and uniqueness of solutions by gauge symmetry breaking. We will also demonstrate some strong regularization results for the solution and see how they lead to detailed short-time asymptotic estimates, as well as the long-time convergence of the Wilson loop functions.