Length spectrum compactification of the $\mathrm{SO}_{0}(2,3)$-Hitchin component

We find a compactification of the $\mathrm{SO}_{0}(2,3)$-Hitchin component by studying the degeneration of the induced metric on the unique equivariant maximal surface in the 4-dimensional pseudo-hyperbolic space $\mathbb{H}^{2,2}$. In the process, we establish the closure in the space of projectivized geodesic currents of the space of flat metrics induced by holomorphic quartic differentials on a Riemann surface. As an application, we describe the behavior of the entropy of Hitchin representations along rays of quartic differentials.