Representations of the fundamental group of a closed oriented surface in Sp(\(4,\mathbb R\)) (Q1876208)

The authors study the number of connected components of the space of representations of the fundamental group of a closed oriented surface in \(\text{Sp}(4, \mathbb R)\), and prove that the moduli space of representations has the same number of connected components as the representation space. More precisely, let \(X\) be a closed oriented surface of genus \(g \geq 2\). Let \(\mathcal X\) be the set of representations of the fundamental group \(\pi_1(X)\) in \(\text{Sp}(4, \mathbb R)\). Given a representation \(\rho \in \mathcal X\), there is an integer associated to it, which is called the degree of \(\rho\). Let \(\mathcal X(d)\) (respectively, \(\mathcal X(d)^+\)) be the subset of \(\mathcal X\) consisting of all the representations (respectively, reductive representations) of degree \(d\). The moduli space of representations of degree \(d\) is defined to be \(\mathcal R(d) = \mathcal X(d)^+/\text{Sp}(4, \mathbb R)\) where \(\text{Sp}(4, \mathbb R)\) acts on \(\mathcal X(d)^+\) by conjugation. The main result in this paper states that if \(0 < | d| < 2g-2\), then both \(\mathcal X(d)\) and \(\mathcal R(d)\) are connected. The idea is to use the fact that \(\mathcal R(d)\) is homeomorphic to the moduli space \(\mathcal M(d)\) of polystable \(\text{Sp}(4, \mathbb R)\)-Higgs bundles. When \(0 < | d| < 2g-2\), the moduli space \(\mathcal M(d)\) is shown to be connected.