Cyclic Higgs bundles and the affine Toda equations (Q2256249)

The Higgs bundle equations and affine Toda field equations lie at the intersection of some intensively studied topics in integrable systems. They are examples of harmonic maps from a surface to a homogeneous space and they are also realized as certain dimensional reductions of the Yang-Mills self-duality equations. This relationship between the two equations has been observed by \textit{E. Aldrovandi} and \textit{G. Falqui} in [J. Geom. Phys. 17, No. 1, 25--48 (1995; Zbl 0841.14005)]. They proved that a certain real form of the affine Toda equations yields solutions to the Higgs bundle equations of a specific form, which in the paper under review are called cyclic. The author provides a proof of the converse statement. He shows that any cyclic Higgs bundle arises from a solution to the affine Toda equations. More precisely, by imposing only a few natural assumptions, the Toda equations can be derived from the Higgs bundle equations.