Moduli Spaces of Abelian Vortices on Kahler Manifolds

Abstract: We consider the self-dual vortex equations on a positive line bundle L --> M over a compact Kaehler manifold of arbitrary dimension. When M is simply connected, the moduli space of vortex solutions is a projective space. When M is an abelian variety, the moduli space is the projectivization of the Fourier-Mukai transform of L. We extend this description of the moduli space to the abelian GLSM, i.e. to vortex equations with a torus gauge group acting linearly on a complex vector space. After establishing the Hitchin-Kobayashi correspondence appropriate for the general abelian GLSM, we give explicit descriptions of the vortex moduli space in the case where the manifold M is simply connected or is an abelian variety. In these examples we compute the Kaehler class of the natural L^2-metric on the moduli space. In the simplest cases we compute the volume and total scalar curvature of the muduli space. Finally, we note that for abelian GLSM the vortex moduli space is a compactification of the space of holomorphic maps from M to toric targets, just as in the usual case of M being a Riemann surface. This leads to various natural conjectures, for instance explicit formulae for the volume of the space of maps CP^m --> CP^n.