Cyclic Higgs bundles and minimal surfaces in pseudo-hyperbolic spaces (Q6142426)

The paper studies a special kind of space-like minimal surfaces in the pseudohyperbolic space \(\mathbb{H}^{n,n}\) (for \(n\) even) and \(\mathbb{H}^{n+1, n-1}\) (for \(n\) odd) that are associated to cyclic \(\mathrm{SO}_{0}(n,n+1)\)-Higgs bundles. These surfaces are saddle-type critical points of the area functional and are thus infinitesimally rigid. The author calls them \(A\)-surfaces because their normal bundle decomposes as a direct sum of rank-\(2\) vector bundles \(\mathcal{L}_{i}\) that inherit from the ambient metric a positive or negative definite metric according to the parity of the index \(i\). When \(n=3\), these surfaces actually arise from cyclic \(G_{2}'\)-Higgs bundles and are pseudoholomorphic curves in \(\mathbb{H}^{4,2}\). In particular, the author gives a new proof of \textit{F. Labourie}'s conjecture [Ann. Sci. Éc. Norm. Supér. (4) 41, No. 3, 439--471 (2008; Zbl 1160.37021)] for \(G_{2}'\).