A note on the Simpson correspondence for semistable Higgs bundles (Q2071465)

\textit{C. T. Simpson} [Publ. Math., Inst. Hautes Étud. Sci. 75, 5--95 (1992; Zbl 0814.32003)] showed that there is an equivalence between the categories of Higgs bundles with vanishing Chern classes which admit a filtration whose quotients are stable Higgs bundles and flat vector bundles. He introduced a differential graded category to reduce the proof to the non-abelian Hodge correspondence between polystable Higgs bunldes with reductive flat connections. In the same paper, Simpson also gave an explicit correspondence for an extension of polystable Higgs bundles, that is, the filtration of stable Higgs bundles of length \(2\). The current paper constructs an explicit correspondence for the filtration of stable Higgs bundles of arbitrary length by applying Simpson's \(\partial\bar\partial\)-lemma for harmonic bundles, and thus gives an elementary proof of Simpson's correspondence. In fact, Higgs bundles are semistable with vanishing Chern classes if and only if they admit a filtration whose quotients are stable Higgs bundles. This is shown by \textit{C. T. Simpson} [Publ. Math., Inst. Hautes Étud. Sci. 75, 5--95 (1992; Zbl 0814.32003)] for compact projective manifolds and by \textit{Y. Nie} and \textit{X. Zhang} [Ann. Global Anal. Geom. 48, No. 4, 345--355 (2015; Zbl 1331.53038)] for compact Kähler manifolds.