Asymptotics of Higgs bundles in the Hitchin component (Q502650)

The paper pursues a geometric approach to compactification of the Hitchin component, having as main motivation Wolf's harmonic map interpretation of Thurston's compactification of Teichmüller spaces with measured foliations. By using Hitchin's parameterization of the Hitchin component by holomorphic differentials, the authors study asymptotics of certain rays of representations: they solve the Hitchin equations asymptotically and use the solution to study the asymptotics of the parallel transport operator of the associated flat connection. It is notable that the asymptotics of the corresponding family of equivariant harmonic maps to the symmetric space \(\mathrm{SL}(n,\mathbb{R})/\mathrm{SO}(n,\mathbb{R})\) proves a conjecture of \textit{L. Katzarkov} et al. [Commun. Math. Phys. 336, No. 2, 853--903 (2015; Zbl 1314.32021)] on the Hitchin WKB problem in the developed setting.