Related papers: Representations of surface groups and Higgs bundle…
These notes have been prepared as reading material for the mini-course given by the author at the "2019 Graduate Summer School" at Park City Mathematics Institute - Institute for Advanced Study. We begin by introducing Higgs bundles and…
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…
This article is based in part on lecture notes prepared for the summer school "The Geometry, Topology and Physics of Moduli Spaces of Higgs Bundles" at the Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the National University of Singapore in July…
This is a survey article whose main goal is to explain how many components of the character variety of a closed surface are either deformation spaces of representations into the maximal compact subgroup or deformation spaces of certain…
Lecture notes from the Third International School on Geometry and Physics at the Centre de Recerca Matematica in Barcelona, March 26--30, 2012.
The moduli spaces for Higgs bundles associated to real Lie groups and a closed Riemann surface have multiple connected components. This survey provides a compendium of results concerning the counting of these components in cases where the…
These notes have been prepared as reading material for the mini-course that the author gave at IMS, National University of Singapore, as part of the "Summer school on the moduli space of Higgs bundles".
This survey provides an introduction to basic questions and techniques surrounding the topology of the moduli space of stable Higgs bundles on a Riemann surface. Through examples, we demonstrate how the structure of the cohomology ring of…
This paper is a survey on the role of Higgs bundle theory in the study of higher Teichm\"uller spaces. Recall that the Teichm\"uller space of a compact surface can be identified with a certain connected component of the moduli space of…
In this note we prove a new explicit formula for the invariants of moduli spaces of twisted Higgs bundles over P^1 and we relate these invariants to the invariants of moduli spaces of representations of some infinite symmetric quiver. The…
This expository paper details the theory of rank one Higgs bundles over a closed Riemann surface X and their relationship to representations of the fundamental group of X. We construct an equivalence between the deformation theories of flat…
This is an expository article on the recent developments of Hodge theory on moduli spaces of smooth projective varieties with semi-ample canonical line bundles.
We place the representation variety in the broader context of abelian and nonabelian cohomology. We outline the equivalent constructions of the moduli spaces of flat bundles, of smooth integrable connections, and of holomorphic integrable…
We calculate certain homotopy groups of the moduli spaces for representations of a compact oriented surface in the Lie groups GL(n,C) and U(p,q). Our approach relies on the interpretation of these representations in terms of Higgs bundles…
In this paper we study the moduli space of representations of a surface group (i.e., the fundamental group of a closed oriented surface) in the real symplectic group Sp(2n,R). The moduli space is partitioned by an integer invariant, called…
We consider the moduli spaces of representations of the fundamental group of a surface of genus g greater than 2 in the Lie groups SU(2,2) and Sp(4,R). It is well known that there is a characteristic number of such a representation, whose…
Geometric structures on manifolds became popular when Thurston used them in his work on the geometrization conjecture. They were studied by many people and they play an important role in higher Teichm\"uller theory. Geometric structures on…
A holomorphic triple over a compact Riemann surface consists of two holomorphic vector bundles and a holomorphic map between them. After fixing the topological types of the bundles and a real parameter, there exist moduli spaces of stable…
The Betti numbers of moduli spaces of representations of a universal central extension of a surface group in the groups U(2,1) and SU(2,1) are calculated. The results are obtained using the identification of these moduli spaces with moduli…
Using the $L^2$ norm of the Higgs field as a Morse function, we study the moduli spaces of $U(p,q)$-Higgs bundles over a Riemann surface. We require that the genus of the surface be at least two, but place no constraints on $(p,q)$. A key…