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.
We give an overview of the work of Corlette, Donaldson, Hitchin and Simpson leading to the non-abelian Hodge theory correspondence between representations of the fundamental group of a surface and the moduli space of Higgs bundles. We then explain ho
w this can be generalized to a correspondence between character varieties for representations of surface groups in real Lie groups G and the moduli space of G-Higgs bundles. Finally we survey recent joint work with Bradlow, Garcia-Prada and Mundet i Riera on the moduli space of maximal Sp(2n,R)-Higgs bundles.
Let $X$ be a compact Riemann surface $X$ of genus at--least two. Fix a holomorphic line bundle $L$ over $X$. Let $mathcal M$ be the moduli space of Hitchin pairs $(E ,phiin H^0(End(E)otimes L))$ over $X$ of rank $r$ and fixed determinant of degree $d
$. We prove that, for some numerical conditions, $mathcal M$ is irreducible, and that the isomorphism class of the variety $mathcal M$ uniquely determines the isomorphism class of the Riemann surface $X$.
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.
