Spin(7)-manifolds and symmetric Yang-Mills instantons

In this Letter we establish a relationship between symmetric SU(2) Yang-Mills instantons and metrics with Spin(7) holonomy. Our method is based on a slight extension of that of Bryant and Salamon developed to construct explicit manifolds with special holonomies in 1989. More precisely, we prove that making use of symmetric SU(2) Yang-Mills instantons on Riemannian spin-manifolds, we can construct metrics on the chiral spinor bundle whose holonomy is, within Spin(7). Moreover, if the resulting space is connected, simply connected and complete, the holonomy coincides with Spin(7). The basic explicit example is the metric constructed on the chiral spinor bundle of the round four-sphere by using a generic SU(2)-instanton of unit action; hence it is a five-parameter deformation of the Bryant-Salamon example, also found by Gibbons, Page and Pope. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.