Morse theory for the space of Higgs bundles (Q939677)

The author of the very interesting paper under review provides all the necessary analytic results in order to construct a Morse theory for the Yang-Mills-Higgs functional on the space of Higgs bundles over a compact Riemann surface. The main result asserts that the gradient flow with initial conditions \((A'',\varphi)\) converges to a critical point of that functional, the isomorphism class of which is given by the graded object associated to the Harder-Narasimhan-Seshadri filtration of \((A'',\varphi).\) In particular, the results of the paper show that the failure of hyper-Kähler Kirwan surjectivity for rank 2 fixed determinant Higgs bundles does not occur because of a failure of the existence of a Morse theory.