Gradient flow of the norm squared of a moment map over Kahler manifolds

Inspired by Wilkin's work [23, 24] on Morse theory for the moduli space of Higgs bundles, we study the moduli space of gauged holomorphic maps by a heat flow approach in the spirit of Atiyah and Bott in a series of papers. In this paper, applying the method of Hong [9], we establish the global existence of smooth solutions of the gradient ow equations of the vortex functional over a compact Kahler manifold.