On cyclic Higgs bundles (Q2308329)

In the paper under review, the authors obtain a maximum principle for a type of elliptic systems and they use it to analyze the Hitchin equation for a special case of Higgs bundle they call cyclic Higgs bundles. They prove several domination results on the pullback metric of the (possibly branched) minimal immersion associated to cyclic Higgs bundles. They also obtain a lower and upper bound of the extrinsic curvature of the image of this minimal immersion. As an application, they give a complete picture for maximal \(\mathrm{Sp}(4,\mathbb{R})\)-representations in the \(2g-3\) Gothen components and the Hitchin components.