Nilpotent Higgs bundles and families of flat connections (Q6046997)

The paper discusses some properties of nilpotent Higgs bundles, families of flat connections and the WKB method. The author investigates \(\mathbb{C}^\times\)-families of flat connections whose leading term is a nilpotent Higgs field. Examples of such families include real twistor lines and families arising from the conformal limit. He shows that these families have the same monodromy as families whose leading term is a regular Higgs bundle and uses this to deduce that traces of holonomies are asymptotically exponential in rational powers of the parameter of the family. The paper is organized as follows. Section 1 is an introduction to the subject. Section 2 deals with necessary background about the geometry of the Hitchin system. The author reviews the definition of Higgs bundles as well as the geometric properties of the moduli space of stable Higgs bundles. Section 3 is devoted to nilpotent WKB analysis where the author studies the \(\mathrm{SL}(2,\mathbb{C})\)-case. This section contains most of the novel ideas of the paper. Section 4 deals with the higher rank case and Section 5 with the case of parabolic Higgs bundles. Here, the author generalizes his results to the case of Higgs bundles for the group \(\mathrm{SL}(n,\mathbb{C})\) and he describes in section 5 how the constructions described apply to to parabolic \(\mathrm{SL}(2,\mathbb{C})\)-Higgs bundles. Section 6 deals with the so-called toy model, the moduli space of parabolic \(\mathrm{SL}(2,\mathbb{C})\)-Higgs bundles over a four-punctured sphere, which has the minimal real dimension possible, namely four. The author discusses the nilpotent cone of the moduli space of Higgs bundles on a four-punctured sphere, dubbed the toy model for its simplicity. The paper is supported by an appendix where the author discusses the existence of WKB curves on Riemann surfaces with holomorphic quadratic differentials.