In a previous paper we have constructed an invariant of four-dimensional manifolds with boundary in the form of an element in the stable homotopy group of the Seiberg-Witten Floer spectrum of the boundary. Here we prove that when one glues two four-manifolds along their boundaries, the Bauer-Furuta invariant of the resulting manifold is obtained by applying a natural pairing to the invariants of the pieces. As an application, we show that the connected sum of three copies of the K3 surface contains no exotic nuclei. In the process we also compute the Floer spectrum for several Seifert fibrations.

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.