No Arabic abstract
Higgs bundles over a closed orientable surface can be defined for any real reductive Lie group G. In this paper we examine the case G=SO*(2n). We describe a rigidity phenomenon encountered in the case of maximal Toledo invariant. Using this and Morse theory in the moduli space of Higgs bundles, we show that the moduli space is connected in this maximal Toledo case. The Morse theory also allows us to show connectedness when the Toledo invariant is zero. The correspondence between Higgs bundles and surface group representations thus allows us to count the connected components with zero and maximal Toledo invariant in the moduli space of representations of the fundamental group of the surface in SO*(2n).
These are the lecture notes from my course in the January 2011 School on Moduli Spaces at the Newton Institute. I give an introduction to Higgs bundles and their application to the study of character varieties for surface group representations.
This is a review article on some applications of generalised parabolic structures to the study of torsion free sheaves and $L$-twisted Hitchin pairs on nodal curves. In particular, we survey on the relation between representations of the fundamental group of a nodal curve and the moduli spaces of generalised parabolic bundles and generalised parabolic $L$-twisted Hitchin pairs on its normalisation as well as on an analogue of the Hitchin map for generalised parabolic $L$-twisted Hitchin pairs.
This is a survey article whose main goal is to explain how many components of the character variety of a closed surface are either deformation spaces of representations into the maximal compact subgroup or deformation spaces of certain Fuchsian representations. This latter family is of particular interest and is related to the field of higher Teichmuller theory. Our main tool is the theory of Higgs bundles. We try to develop the general theory of Higgs bundles for real groups and indicate where subtleties arise. However, the main emphasis is placed on concrete examples which are our motivating objects. In particular, we do not prove any of the foundational theorems, rather we state them and show how they can be used to prove interesting statements about components of the character variety. We have also not spent any time developing the tools (harmonic maps) which define the bridge between Higgs bundles and the character variety. For this side of the story we refer the reader to the survey article of Q. Li [arXiv:1809.05747].
Relying on a notion of numerical effectiveness for Higgs bundles, we show that the category of numerically flat Higgs vector bundles on a smooth projective variety $X$ is a Tannakian category. We introduce the associated group scheme, that we call the Higgs fundamental group scheme of $X$, and show that its properties are related to a conjecture about the vanishing of the Chern classes of numerically flat Higgs vector bundles.
In this paper, we consider a generalization of the theory of Higgs bundles over a smooth complex projective curve in which the twisting of the Higgs field by the canonical bundle of the curve is replaced by a rank 2 vector bundle. We define a Hitchin map and give a spectral correspondence. We also state a Hitchin-Kobayashi correspondence for a generalization of the Hitchin equations to this situation. In a certain sense, this theory lies halfway between the theories of Higgs bundles on a curve and on a higher dimensional variety.