Energy of sections of the Deligne-Hitchin twistor space (Q2049949)

The aim of this paper is to study a natural functional on the space of holomorphic sections of the Deligne-Hitchin moduli space of a compact Riemann surface, generalizing the energy of equivariant harmonic maps corresponding to twistor lines. The authors show that the energy is the residue of the pull-back along the section of a natural meromorphic connection on the hyper-holomorphic line bundle recently constructed by Hitchin. As a byproduct, they show the existence of a hyper-Kähler potentials for new components of real holomorphic sections of twistor spaces of hyper-Kähler manifolds with rotating \(S^1\)-action. Additionally, they prove that for a certain class of real holomorphic sections of the Deligne-Hitchin moduli space, the energy functional is basically given by the Willmore energy of corresponding equivariant conformal map to the \(3\)-sphere. As an application the authors use the functional to distinguish new components of real holomorphic sections of the Deligne-Hitchin moduli space from the space of twistor lines. This paper is organized as follows: In Section 1 the authors set up some notation and recall basic notions associated with holomorphic sections of the Deligne-Hitchin moduli space over a compact Riemann surface. In Section 2 they define the energy functional and prove its basic properties. Section 3 contains the natural interpretation of the energy functional in terms of the residue of the meromorphic connection on the hyperholomorphic line bundle over the Deligne-Hitchin moduli space \(\mathcal{M}_{DH}(\Sigma, G_\mathbb{C})\) [\textit{C. Simpson}, Proc. Symp. Pure Math. 62, 217--281 (1997; Zbl 0914.14003)]. In Section 4, the authors relate the energy of the real holomorphic sections constructed in [\textit{L. Heller} and \textit{S. Heller}, ``Higher solutions of Hitchin's self-duality equations'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1801.02402}] to the Willmore energy of the related Möbius equivariant Willmore surfaces. In the final Section 5, they show that the energy functional can be used to distinguish different components of the space of real holomorphic sections. In particular, they prove that the new sections of [loc. cit.] have positive energy.