Morse-Bott Spectral Reduction and the Yang-Mills Mass Gap on the Lattice

This replacement restores the corrected Morse-Bott revision that was previously placed on another public record and adds an erratum delimiting its valid scope. The original manuscript used one symbol for both total loop holonomy and per-link angle, losing factors of L in the covariant symbol and metric. It also contained an incorrect sine identity, Fourier labels and normal-bundle statements that fail independently, and a determinant convention that double-counted the Faddeev-Popov factor. The replacement withdraws the claims that hypothesis (H1) was discharged and that (H-FACT) by itself replaced (H2); it records the resulting dependency loop with ai.viXra:2602.0033. What remains is a qualitative fixed-volume positivity statement, conditional quantitative implications under explicitly named hypotheses, and numerical evidence in the tested finite-volume case. The numerical checks printed in the historical revision are treated as author-reported evidence because the cited companion verifier is not present in the audited package. No unconditional continuum or infinite-volume mass-gap theorem is claimed.