Some observations on deformed Donaldson-Thomas connections

A deformed Donaldson-Thomas (dDT) connection is a Hermitian connection of a Hermitian line bundle over a $G_2$-manifold $X$ satisfying a certain nonlinear PDE. This is considered to be the mirror of a (co)associative cycle in the context of mirror symmetry. It can also be considered as an analogue of a $G_2$-instanton. In this paper, we see that some important observations that appear in other geometric problems are also found in the dDT case as follows. (1) A dDT connection exists if a 7-manifold has full holonomy $G_2$ and the $G_2$-structure is ``sufficiently large". (2) The dDT equation is described as the zero of a certain multi-moment map. (3) The gradient flow equation of a Chern-Simons type functional of Karigiannis and Leung, whose critical points are dDT connections, agrees with the ${\rm Spin}(7)$ version of the dDT equation on a cylinder with respect to a certain metric on a certain space. This can be considered as an analogue of the observation in instanton Floer homology for 3-manifolds.