Family of curves with large unitary summand in the Hodge bundle (Q2633111)

This paper disproves Xiao's conjecture for the rank of the unitary summand of the Hodge bundle of a non-trivial fibration of curves. Indeed, the author constructs examples of non-isotrivial families of curves of genus $g\ge 3$ such that the unitary rank of the Hodge bundle can be as large as $(2g+1)/3$. The construction is done using the cyclic cover of $\mathbb{P}^1$ with four ramification points.