The uniqueness of tangent cones for Yang–Mills connections with isolated singularities

We proved a uniqueness theorem of tangent connections for a Yang–Mills connection with an isolated singularity with a quadratic growth of the curvature at the singularity. We also obtained control over the rate of the asymptotic convergence of the connection to the tangent connection if furthermore the connection is stationary or the tangent connection is integrable, with a stronger result in the latter case. There are parallel results for the cones at infinity of a Yang–Mills connection on an asymptotically flat manifold. We also gave an application of our methods to the Yang–Mills flow and proved that the Yang–Mills flow exists for all time and has asymptotic limit if the initial value is close to a smooth local minimizer of the Yang–Mills functional. r 2003 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.