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.
Here we survey several results and conjectures on the cohomology of the total space of the Hitchin system: the moduli space of semi-stable rank n and degree d Higgs bundles on a complex algebraic curve C. The picture emerging is a dynamic mixture of
ideas originating in theoretical physics such as gauge theory and mirror symmetry, Weil conjectures in arithmetic algebraic geometry, representation theory of finite groups of Lie type and Langlands duality in number theory.
We show that a natural isomorphism between the rational cohomology groups of the two zero-dimensional Hilbert schemes of $n$-points of two surfaces, the affine plane minus the axes and the cotangent bundle of an elliptic curve, exchanges the weight f
iltration on the first set of cohomology groups with the perverse Leray filtration associated with a natural fibration on the second set of cohomology groups. We discuss some associated hard Lefschetz phenomena.
For G = GL_2, PGL_2 and SL_2 we prove that the perverse filtration associated to the Hitchin map on the cohomology of the moduli space of twisted G-Higgs bundles on a Riemann surface C agrees with the weight filtration on the cohomology of the twiste
d G character variety of C, when the cohomologies are identified via non-Abelian Hodge theory. The proof is accomplished by means of a study of the topology of the Hitchin map over the locus of integral spectral curves.
We prove a generating function formula for the Betti numbers of Nakajima quiver varieties. We prove that it is a q-deformation of the Weyl-Kac character formula. In particular this implies that the constant term of the polynomial counting the number
of absolutely indecomposable representations of a quiver equals the multiplicity of a a certain weight in the corresponding Kac-Moody algebra, which was conjectured by Kac in 1982.
Here we survey questions and results on the Hodge theory of hyperkaehler quotients, motivated by certain S-duality considerations in string theory. The problems include L^2 harmonic forms, Betti numbers and mixed Hodge structures on the moduli spaces
of Yang-Mills instantons on ALE gravitational instantons, magnetic monopoles on R^3 and Higgs bundles on a Riemann surface. Several of these spaces and their hyperkaehler metrics were constructed by Nigel Hitchin and his collaborators.
