Cyclic Higgs bundles and the affine Toda equations

We introduce a class of Higgs bundles called cyclic which lie in the Hitchin component of representations of a compact Riemann surface into the split real form of a simple Lie group. We then prove that such a Higgs bundle is equivalent to a certain class of solutions to the affine Toda equations. We further explain this relationships in terms of lifts of harmonic maps.