Morse theory for the space of Higgs bundles

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Abstract: Here we prove the necessary analytic results 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 is that the gradient flow with initial conditions (A,phi) converges to a critical point of this functional, the isomorphism class of which is given by the graded object associated to the Harder-Narasimhan-Seshadri filtration of (A,phi). In particular, the results of this paper show that the failure of hyperk"ahler Kirwan surjectivity for rank 2 fixed determinant Higgs bundles does not occur because of a failure of the existence of a Morse theory.




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