UC Irvine

In the spirit of recent work of Lamm, Malchiodi and Micallef in the setting of harmonic maps, we identify Yang-Mills connections obtained by approximations with respect to the Yang-Mills alpha-energy. More specifically, we show that for the SU(2) Hopf fibration over the four sphere, for sufficiently small alpha values the rotation invariant ADHM connection is the unique alpha-critical point which has Yang-Mills alpha-energy lower than a specific threshold.