In this paper we survey geometric and arithmetic techniques to study the cohomology of semiprojective hyperkaehler manifolds including toric hyperkaehler varieties, Nakajima quiver varieties and moduli spaces of Higgs bundles on Riemann surfaces. The
resulting formulae for their Poincare polynomials are combinatorial and representation theoretical in nature. In particular we will look at their Betti numbers and will establish some results and expectations on their asymptotic shape.
We give a cohomological interpretation of both the Kac polynomial and the refined Donaldson-Thomas- invariants of quivers. This interpretation yields a proof of a conjecture of Kac from 1982 and gives a new perspective on recent work of Kontsevich-So
ibelman. This is achieved by computing, via an arithmetic Fourier transform, the dimensions of the isoytpical components of the cohomology of associated Nakajima quiver varieties under the action of a Weyl group. The generating function of the corresponding Poincare polynomials is an extension of Huas formula for Kac polynomials of quivers involving Hall-Littlewood symmetric functions. The resulting formulae contain a wide range of information on the geometry of the quiver varieties.
We study connections between the topology of generic character varieties of fundamental groups of punctured Riemann surfaces, Macdonald polynomials, quiver representations, Hilbert schemes on surfaces, modular forms and multiplicities in tensor produ
cts of irreducible characters of finite general linear groups.
