Anosov flows, surface groups and curves in projective space (Q2502041)

The author obtains new fundamental results on the subject that is now called ``Higher Teich\-müller theory'', which was initiated by work of Hitchin in 1990, and continued by several authors, including Labourie, Fock-Goncharov and Burger-Iozzi-Weinhard. He obtains results which give a geometric and a dynamic interpretation of the representations in the Hitchin components of the spaces of representations of the fundamental group of a compact surface in \(\text{PSL}(n,\mathbb R)\). In a famous paper [Topology 31, 449--473 (1992; Zbl 0769.32008)], \textit{N. Hitchin} studied the connected components of the space of reducible representations of the fundamental group of a compact surface \(S\) in \(\text{PSL}(n,\mathbb R)\). He showed that one of these components when \(n\) is odd, and two of these components when \(n\) is even, has a very simple topology. Such a component is now called a Hitchin component. In the case \(n=2\), this component corresponds to holonomies of hyperbolic structures on \(S\), and it is identified with the Teichmüller space of the surface. For \(n=3\), this component has been identified, by work of Goldman and Choi, with the space of holonomies of convex real projective structures on \(S\). In the paper under review, the author extends this analysis to higher dimensions, by associating to every representation in a Hitchin component a curve in projective space, which he calls a hyperconvex Frenet curve. Such a curve generalizes the Veronese embedding from \(P(\mathbb R^2)\) into \(P(\mathbb R^n)\). The author also proves that each representation in a Hitchin component is faithful, discrete and purely loxodromic, generalizing an analogous result in Teichmüller space theory.