Irregular connections and Kac-Moody root systems

Some moduli spaces of irregular connections on the trivial bundle over the Riemann sphere will be identified with Nakajima quiver varieties. In particular this enables us to associate a Kac-Moody root system to such connections (yielding many isomorphisms between such moduli spaces, via the reflection functors for the corresponding Weyl group). The possibility of 'reading' a quiver in different ways also yields numerous isomorphisms between such moduli spaces, often between spaces of connections on different rank bundles and with different polar divisors. Finally some results of Crawley-Boevey on the existence of stable connections will be extended to this more general context.