Stratifications on the nilpotent cone of the moduli space of Hitchin pairs (Q2141395)

Recall that a Higgs bundle on a Riemann surface is a pair consisting of a holomorphic vector bundle together with an endomorphism valued holomorphic one-form, called the Higgs field. The present paper considers the problem of finding the limit at infinity of a Higgs bundle in the nilpotent cone under the natural \(\mathbb{C}^*\)-action on the moduli space. For general rank the authors provide an answer for Higgs bundles with regular nilpotent Higgs field, while in rank three they give the complete answer. Their results show that the limit can be described in terms of data defined by the Higgs field, via a filtration of the underlying vector bundle. This paper is organized as follows. Section 1 is an introduction to the subject and gives some necessary preliminaries about Hitchin pairs, Higgs bundles and their moduli spaces, and introduces the Hitchin map, the nilpotent cone and the \(\mathbb{C}^*\)-action. Section 2 presents the result in general rank for Hitchin pairs with regular nilpotent Higgs field. In Section 3, the authors give the complete result for Hitchin pairs of rank 3 with nilpotent Higgs field.