Monodromy of rank 2 parabolic Hitchin systems (Q2666650)

The aim of this paper is to study the monodromy of the Hitchin fibration for moduli spaces of parabolic \(G\)-Higgs bundles in the cases when \(G=SL(2,\mathbb{R})\), \(GL(2,\mathbb{R})\) and \(PGL(2,\mathbb{R})\). A calculation of the orbits of the monodromy with \(\mathbb{Z}_2\)-coefficients provides an exact count of the components of the moduli spaces for these groups. This paper is organized as follows : The first section is an introduction to the subject and summarizes the main results. In the second section the authors introduce terminology for the moduli spaces of parabolic \(G\)-Higgs bundles that they are primarily interested in this paper. In section 3, they consider the Hitchin fibration and the construction of the spectral curve for rank \(2\) parabolic Hitchin systems. They also discuss here the parabolic version of the BNR correspondence with particular focus on the subvarieties of the Picard group restricted to which the correspondence is one-to-one, as well as on the Prym variety of the spectral covering of the \(V\)-surface. Moduli spaces of parabolic (or non-parabolic) \(G\)-Higgs bundles can be decomposed into closed subvarieties, yet not necessarily connected components, for fixed values of appropriate topological invariants. In this section the authors describe such topological invariants for the moduli spaces they are interested in, namely for the rank 2 cases \(G=SL(2,\mathbb{R})\), \(GL(2,\mathbb{R})\) and \(PGL(2,\mathbb{R})\). Here, the authors include the discussion for the topological invariants leading to the minimum number of connected components, while in section 5 they study the monodromy action on \(2\)-torsion points on the lattices. Finally, section 6 and section 7 include the exact calculation of the number of orbits of the monodromy action. The paper is supported by an appendix concerning BNR correspondence for orbicurves.