Counts of maps to Grassmannians and intersections on the moduli space of bundles

We show that intersection numbers on the moduli space of stable bundles of coprime rank and degree over a smooth complex curve can be recovered as highest-degree asymptotics in formulas of Vafa-Intriligator type. In particular, we explicitly evaluate all intersection numbers appearing in the Verlinde formula. Our results are in agreement with previous computations of Witten, Jeffrey-Kirwan and Liu. Moreover, we prove the vanishing of certain intersections on a suitable Quot scheme which can be interpreted as giving equations between counts of maps to the Grassmannian.