TITLE: Yang Mills gradient/heat flow on 4-torus
QUESTION [7 upvotes]: The classic Donaldson-Kronheimer book (Geometry of 4-manifolds) uses the Yang Mills gradient flow (sometimes called heat flow) on $M$ all over the place,
$\frac{d A}{dt} = -\frac{\delta YM(A)}{\delta A}$
where $YM(A)$ is the Yang Mills 'action' the integral of the curvature square,
$YM(A) = \int d^4x Tr F_{\mu\nu} F_{\mu\nu} > 0$
The setting is quite general, either $M$ is a general 4-manifold or Kahler manifold and so all theorems, existence, uniqueness, etc, are quite general.
I'm wondering if there are further results somewhere for the specific case of $M = T^4$ the 4-torus. For example, is it known how the long time asymptotics look like in this case? Theorems about possible blow-ups? I'd think asymptotically the gradient flow drives the connection towards a critical point but is it known how it is approached, exponentially or polynomially in $t$?
Actually for $M=T^4$ I suspect $t^2 YM(A(t))$ goes to a constant for $t\to\infty$ as long as the initial condition for the flow is in a sufficiently small neighbourhood of the absolute minimum of $YM(A)$ but I can't prove it. What is certainly true is that $YM(A(t))$ is a decreasing function of $t$.

REPLY [4 votes]: Donaldson and Kronheimer wrote their book by 1990. There were some further developments about long time behaviour of Yang-Mills flow on four manifolds by, among others, Struwe and collaborators. You may try starting with Schlatter's dissertation. 
Crawling through MathSciNet reference links may get you "somewhere", but it is my impression that higher dimensional Yang-Mills heat flow is still somewhat of an open problem. Is there any reason why you expect $\mathbb{T}^4$ would be better behaved than, say, the unit ball?