We take another approach to Hitchins strategy of computing the cohomology of moduli spaces of Higgs bundles by localization with respect to the circle-action. Our computation is done in the dimensional completion of the Grothendieck ring of varieties
and starts by describing the classes of moduli stacks of chains rather than their coarse moduli spaces. As an application we show that the n-torsion of the Jacobian acts trivially on the middle dimensional cohomology of the moduli space of twisted SL_n-Higgs-bundles of degree coprime to n and we give an explicit formula for the motive of the moduli space of Higgs bundles of rank 4 and odd degree. This provides new evidence for a conjecture of Hausel and Rodriguez-Villegas. Along the way we find explicit recursion formulas for the motives of several types of moduli spaces of stable chains.
We develop a complete Hitchin-Kobayashi correspondence for twisted pairs on a compact Riemann surface X. The main novelty lies in a careful study of the the notion of polystability for pairs, required for having a bijective correspondence between sol
utions to the Hermite-Einstein equations, on one hand, and polystable pairs, on the other. Our results allow us to establish rigorously the homemomorphism between the moduli space of polystable G-Higgs bundles on X and the character variety for representations of the fundamental group of X in G. We also study in detail several interesting examples of the correspondence for particular groups and show how to significantly simplify the general stability condition in these cases.
