Yang-Mills theory and Tamagawa numbers: the fascination of unexpected links in mathematics

Atiyah and Bott used equivariant Morse theory applied to theYang–Mills functional to calculate the Betti numbers ofmoduli spaces of vector bundles over a Riemann surface, rederivinginductive formulae obtained from an arithmetic approach whichinvolved the Tamagawa number of SL_n. This article attempts tosurvey and extend our understanding of this link between Yang–Millstheory and Tamagawa numbers, and to explain how methods usedover the last three decades to study the singular cohomologyof moduli spaces of bundles on a smooth projective curve over can be adapted to the setting of ¹-homotopy theory to studythe motivic cohomology of these moduli spaces over an algebraicallyclosed field.