Approximate Yang-Mills-Higgs metrics on flat Higgs bundles over an affine manifold (Q474814)

A special affine manifold is a manifold \(M\) with a flat torsion-free connection \(D\) and a parallel volume form. Let \( E \to M\) be a smooth vector bundle on \(M\) equipped with a flat connection \(\nabla\). A Higgs field on a vector bundle \(E \) over \(M\) is a parallel section \(\varphi\) of \(TM \otimes\mathrm{End}(E)\) such that \(\varphi\wedge \varphi =0\). The authors associates with a Higgs field \(\varphi\) a natural filtration of the vector bundle \(E\) compatible with \(\nabla\) and \(\varphi\) such that the successive quotients are polystable. Using this filtration, they construct a smooth Hermitian metric \( h\) on the vector bundle \(E\) and a smooth one-parameter family \( A_t\) of automorphisms of \(E\) with the following property: Let \(\nabla^t\) and \(\varphi^t\) be the family of flat connections and Higgs fields respectively obtained from \(\nabla, \varphi\) by transformations \(A_t\). Then the triple \((h, \nabla^t, \varphi^t)\) defines the extended connection form \(\theta^t\) on \(E\) which converges for \(t \to \infty\) in the \(C^{\infty}\) Fréchet topology to the extended connection form \(\hat{\theta}\) on \(E\) given by the affine Yang-Mills-Higgs metrics on the polystable quotients of the successive terms in the above mentioned filtration.