The quiver at the bottom of the twisted nilpotent cone on P^1

Algebraic moduli problems, moduli of vector bundles (14D20) Vector bundles on curves and their moduli (14H60) Relationships between algebraic curves and physics (14H81)

Abstract: For the moduli space of Higgs bundles on a Riemann surface of positive genus, critical points of the natural Morse-Bott function lie along the nilpotent cone of the Hitchin fibration and are representations of

m b o x A

-type quivers in a twisted category of holomorphic bundles. The critical points that globally minimize the function are representations of

m b o x A_{1}

. For twisted Higgs bundles on the projective line, the quiver describing the bottom of the cone is more complicated. We determine it here. We show that the moduli space is topologically connected whenever the rank and degree are coprime, thereby verifying conjectural lowest Betti numbers coming from high-energy physics.

Review text

This paper makes an important addition to the topological aspect of the intensely active area of moduli spaces of Higgs bundles and their generalizations. The basic data of a Higgs bundle are a compact Riemann surface \(X\) with canonical line bundle \(\omega_X\), a holomorphic vector bundles \(E\) over \(X\), and a ``Higgs field \(\phi: E\rightarrow E\otimes \omega_X\). The two main generalizations are ``parabolic Higgs bundles (cf., e.g., [\textit{H. U. Boden} and \textit{K. Yokogawa}, Int. J. Math. 7, No. 5, 573--598 (1996; Zbl 0883.14012)]) and ``twisted Higgs bundles, where, in the case \(X={\mathbb P}^1\) of interest in this paper, \(\omega_X\) is replaced by an arbitrary ample line bundle \({\mathcal O}(t)\) in the target of the holomorphic-bundle map \(\phi\) (cf., e.g., [\textit{E. Markman}, Compos. Math. 93, No. 3, 255--290 (1994; Zbl 0824.14013)]): one example are the ``co-Higgs bundles studied by this author in his PhD Thesis [Univ. of Oxford (2001)] and in [New York J. Math. 19, 925--945 (2013; Zbl 1287.14003)]. The twisted bundles, in particular, have great prominence in the area of algebraically completely integrable systems. \textit{N. J. Hitchin} [Proc. Lond. Math. Soc. (3) 55, 59--126 (1987; Zbl 0634.53045)] made the observation, already in the paper where he introduced the Higgs fields, that \(f(E,\phi ):=\|\phi \|^2/2,\) with the norm defined by the natural Kaehler metric, in a Morse-Bott function on the moduli space, and therefore can be used to extract topological information. Up to some technical details this remains true for the generalized Higgs spaces. It is therefore of interest to compute the critical set of \(f\), and this was done for Riemann surfaces of positive genus. The motivation for the title of this paper is that in the known cases the critical set was indeed related to nilpotent Higgs fields, cf. [\textit{V. Ginzburg}, Duke Math. J. 109, No. 3, 511--519 (2001; Zbl 1116.14007)]. For \(X={\mathbb P}^1\), the answer is much more contrived, and the author achieves it by the use of ``holomorphic chains, namely, representations of an \(A\)-type quiver \(Q\). Here \(Q\) has underlying graph \(A_n\), \(n\geq 1\), and each one of its nodes is indexed by pairs of integers \((r_i,d_i),\;1\leq i\leq n\) satisfying an arithmetic condition; each node comes with a bundle \(U_i\) of rank \(r_i\) and degree \(d_i\) and an \(F\)-twisted morphism \(\phi :U_i\rightarrow U_{i+1}\otimes F\), where \(F\) is a fixed auxiliary bundle. Using this idea, which reduces the calculation of the Morse index to putting together in a very fine way dimensions of cohomology groups of the attendant bundles, the author obtains his main theorems, for the moduli space of twisted Higgs fields of rank \(r\) and degree \(-d\), in the case gcd\((r,d)=1.\) In short, the result is that \(f\) achieves its minimum over a subvariety (given by oints where a representative of the moduli point has trivial bundles and injective homomorphisms) of a quiver-bundle variety associated with the graph \(A_{\lceil\log_{t+1}(r/d) \rceil}\). An important by-product, given by the value of the Betti numbers, is the verification that in this case the twisted-bundles moduli space is topologically connected: as the author points out, this is a satisfying direct proof of one case of a standing conjecture.

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