Related papers: Hitchin harmonic maps are immersions

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…

We identify dglas that control infinitesimal deformations of the pairs (manifold, Higgs bundle) and of Hitchin pairs. As a consequence, we recover known descriptions of first order deformations and we refine known results on obstructions.…

We introduce para-complex and pseudo-Riemannian geometric methods for the study of representations of surface groups in $\mathrm{SL}(2m+1,\mathbb{R})$. For $m=1$ our techniques allow to recover several known results for Hitchin…

This paper concerns the relationship between locally homogeneous geometric structures on topological surfaces and the moduli of polystable Higgs bundles on Riemann surfaces, due to Hitchin and Simpson. In particular we discuss the…

Recently, E.Martinengo obtained results on obstructions to deformations of Higgs pairs by describing an L-infinity morphism inducing the Hitchin map. In this note we show that analogous results hold for principal G-Higgs bundles, where G is…

We are interested in studying the variation of the Hitchin fibration in moduli spaces of parabolic Higgs bundles, under the action of a ramified covering. Given a degree two map $\pi$ : Y $\rightarrow$ X between compact Riemann surfaces, we…

We introduce the concept of a Fock bundle, a smooth principal bundle over a surface equipped with a special kind of adjoint-valued 1-form, as a new tool for studying character varieties of surface groups. Although similar to Higgs bundles,…

Given a closed, oriented surface X of genus g>1, and a semisimple Lie group G, let R_G be the moduli space of reductive representations of the fundamental group of X in G. We determine the number of connected components of R_PGL(n,R), for…

In this paper, we derive a maximum principle for a type of elliptic systems and apply it to analyze the Hitchin equation for cyclic Higgs bundles. We show several domination results on the pullback metric of the (possibly branched) minimal…

This thesis contains work which appeared in several papers. Additionally to the results in the papers it contains a detailed introduction and some further proofs and remarks. The dissertation gives a description of the topology and…

In this paper the moduli space of Higgs pairs over a fixed smooth projective curve with extra formal data is defined and it is endowed with a scheme structure. We introduce a relative version of the Krichever map using a fibration of Sato…

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…

We study the Hitchin map for $G_{\mathbb{R}}$-Higgs bundles on a smooth curve, where $G_{\mathbb{R}}$ is a quasi-split real form of a complex reductive algebraic group $G$. By looking at the moduli stack of regular $G_{\mathbb{R}}$-Higgs…

Let $X$ be a compact Riemann surface. Let $(E,\theta)$ be a stable Higgs bundle of degree $0$ on $X$. Let $h_{\det(E)}$ denote a flat metric of the determinant bundle $\det(E)$. For any $t>0$, there exists a unique harmonic metric $h_t$ of…

We give a sufficient criterion, which we call stability, for a coarse Lipschitz map $f$ from a complete manifold $X$ with Ricci curvature bounded below to a proper Hadamard space $Y$ to be within bounded distance of a harmonic map. We prove…

Let $X$ be a compact Riemann surface of genus $g \geq 2$, and let $D \subset X$ be a fixed finite subset. Let $\mathcal{M}(r,d,\alpha)$ denote the moduli space of stable parabolic $G$-bundles (where $G$ is a complex orthogonal or symplectic…

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…

We construct a Lagrangian formulation of Hitchin's self-duality equations on a Riemann surface $\Sigma$ using potentials for the connection and Higgs field. This two-dimensional action is then obtained from a four-dimensional Chern-Simons…

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…

The present note is mostly a survey on the generalised Hitchin integrable system and moduli spaces of meromorphic Higgs bundles. We also fill minor gaps in the existing literature, outline a calculation of the infinitesimal period map and…