(Anti-)Instantons and the Atiyah-Hitchin Manifold - Archive ouverte HAL Access content directly
Journal Articles Journal of High Energy Physics Year : 2000

## (Anti-)Instantons and the Atiyah-Hitchin Manifold

, (1)
1
A. Hanany
• Function : Author
B. Pioline

#### Abstract

The Atiyah-Hitchin manifold arises in many different contexts, ranging from its original occurrence as the moduli space of two SU(2) \'t Hooft-Polyakov monopoles in 3+1 dimensions, to supersymmetric backgrounds of string theory. In all these settings, (super)symmetries require the metric to be hyperk\\ähler and have an SO(3) transitive isometry, which in the four-dimensional case essentially selects out the Atiyah-Hitchin manifold as the only such smooth manifold with the correct topology at infinity. In this paper, we analyze the exponentially small corrections to the asymptotic limit, and interpret them as infinite series of instanton corrections in these various settings. Unexpectedly, the relevant configurations turn out to be bound states of $n$ instantons and $\\bar n$ anti-instantons, with $|n-\\bar n|=0,1$ as required by charge conservation. We propose that the semi-classical configurations relevant for the higher monopole moduli space are Euclidean open branes stretched between the monopoles.

### Dates and versions

hal-00016311 , version 1 (26-12-2005)

### Identifiers

• HAL Id : hal-00016311 , version 1
• ARXIV :

### Cite

A. Hanany, B. Pioline. (Anti-)Instantons and the Atiyah-Hitchin Manifold. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2000, 0007, pp.001. ⟨hal-00016311⟩

### Export

BibTeX TEI Dublin Core DC Terms EndNote Datacite

29 View