Boundary of the Gothen components (Q2683770)

The aim of this paper is to describe a new phenomenon about the length spectrum compactification of the \(\mathrm{Sp}(4,\mathbb{R})\)-maximal representations of the fundamental group of a closed surface. In this paper, they show that all Gothen components \(\mathcal{G}(k)\) for all \(1\leq k\leq2g-3\), up to taking a quotient by a compact factor, share the same boundary in their length spectrum topology. In a previous paper [\textit{C. Ouyang} and \textit{A. Tamburelli}, ``Length spectrum compactification of the \(\mathrm{SO}_0(2,3)\)-Hitchin component'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:2010.03499}], the authors used a pseudo-Riemannian point of view to define the length spectrum of an \(\mathrm{Sp}(4,\mathbb{R})\)-Hitchin representation and describe the boundary of this component (modulo an \(S^1\)-action) as projectivized mixed structures, that is hybrid geometric objects on the surface that are measured laminations on some collection of incompressible subsurfaces and flat metrics of finite area induced by meromorphic quartic differentials on the complement. The authors show that the Hitchin component and all Gothen components share the same boundary in their length spectrum compactification. The main idea behind the proof of this result lies in a comparison between the induced metric on the maximal surface associated to a maximal representation and the flat metric \(|q|^{\frac{1}{2}}\) with cone singularities, where \(q\) is the holomorphic quartic differential in the Hitchin base. They show that for any diverging sequence in \(\mathcal{G}(k)\), the length spectra of these two metrics after a suitable renormalization converge to that of mixed structures which enjoy the same decomposition into subsurfaces and coincide on their non-laminar part. As an application of their estimates and the work of \textit{S. Dai} and \textit{Q. Li} [Math. Ann. 376, No. 3--4, 1225--1260 (2020; Zbl 1448.14030)], they also describe the length spectrum for the induced metrics on the unique minimal surfaces in \(\mathrm{Sp}(4,\mathbb{R})/U(2)\). The paper is organized as follows. Section 0 is an introduction to the subject. Section 1 deals with background material. Sections 2 is devoted to boundary of the Gothen components, and Sections 3 to induced metrics on the minimal surfaces.