Parabolic Hitchin maps and their generic fibers (Q2126070)

The aim of this paper is to study parabolic Hitchin maps [\textit{N. Hitchin}, Duke Math. J. 54, 91--114 (1987; Zbl 0627.14024)] and their generic fibers. It is concerned with a parabolic version of the Beauville, Narasimhan and Ramanan (BNR) correspondence [\textit{A. Beauville} et al., J. Reine Angew. Math. 398, 169--179 (1989; Zbl 0666.14015)]. The authors show that a generic fiber of the strongly parabolic Hitchin map can be identified with the Picard variety (of certain degree) of the normalization of the corresponding spectral curve. They set up a BNR correspondence for moduli spaces of Higgs bundles over a curve with a parabolic structure over any algebraically closed field. This leads to a concrete description of generic fibers of the associated strongly parabolic Hitchin map. They also show that the global nilpotent cone is equi-dimensional with half dimension of the total space. As a result, the authors prove the flatness and surjectivity of this map and the existence of very stable parabolic vector bundles. This paper is organized as follows: Section 1 is an introduction to the subject and summarizes the main results. Section 2 deals with strongly and weakly parabolic Higgs bundles and parabolic Hitchin maps. Section 3 is devoted to parabolic Hitchin maps. In Section 4, the authors determine the generic fibers of the strongly parabolic Hitchin map. They start from a local analysis, and then derive from it the parabolic BNR correspondence. Section 5 is devoted to generic fiber of weakly parabolic Hitchin maps. Here, the authors give a geometric description of generic fibers of the weakly parabolic Hitchin map (which is called the parabolic Hitchin map in [\textit{M. Logares} and \textit{J. Martens}, J. Reine Angew. Math. 649, 89--116 (2010; Zbl 1223.14038)]). They treat it in a more geometric manner for a special case, i.e., the spectral curve is smooth and unramified over the marked point (without loss of generality, the authors assume that there is only one marked point). In this setting, the number of connected components is equal to the cardinality of the Coxeter group associated to the parabolic subalgebra. Section 6 deals with global nilpotent cone of strongly/weakly parabolic Hitchin maps. In this section, the authors study global properties of strongly/weakly parabolic Hitchin maps, i.e., flatness and surjectivity. The paper is supported by an appendix where the authors discuss singularities of generic spectral curves, along with ramifications.