DECONSTRUCTING MONOPOLES AND INSTANTONS

Abstract

We give a unifying description of the Dirac monopole on the 2-sphere S2, of a graded monopole on a (2, 2)-supersphere S2, 2 and of the BPST instanton on the 4-sphere S4, by constructing a suitable global projector p via equivariant maps. This projector determines the projective modules of finite type of sections of the corresponding vector bundle. The canonical connection ∇ = p ◦ d is used to compute the topological charge which is found to be equal to -1 for the three cases. The transposed projector q = pt gives the value +1 for the charges; this showing that transposition of projectors, although an isomorphism in K-theory, is not the identity map. We also study the invariance under the action of suitable Lie groups.