INTERSECTION COHOMOLOGY OF RANK 2 CHARACTER VARIETIES OF SURFACE GROUPS

For $G = \mathrm {GL}_2, \mathrm {SL}_2, \mathrm {PGL}_2$ we compute the intersection E-polynomials and the intersection Poincaré polynomials of the G-character variety of a compact Riemann surface C and of the moduli space of G-Higgs bundles on C of degree zero. We derive several results concerning the P=W conjectures for these singular moduli spaces.

Uniformization of branched surfaces and Higgs bundles

Given a compact connected Riemann surface [Formula: see text] of genus [Formula: see text], and an effective divisor [Formula: see text] on [Formula: see text] with [Formula: see text], there is a unique cone metric on [Formula: see text] of constant negative curvature [Formula: see text] such that the cone angle at each point [Formula: see text] is [Formula: see text] [R. C. McOwen, Point singularities and conformal metrics on Riemann surfaces, Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 103 (1988) 222–224; M. Troyanov, Prescribing curvature on compact surfaces with conical singularities, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 324 (1991) 793–821]. We describe the Higgs bundle on [Formula: see text] corresponding to the uniformization associated to this conical metric. We also give a family of Higgs bundles on [Formula: see text] parametrized by a nonempty open subset of [Formula: see text] that correspond to conical metrics of the above type on moving Riemann surfaces. These are inspired by Hitchin’s results in [N. J. Hitchin, The self-duality equations on a Riemann surface, Proc. London Math. Soc. 55 (1987) 59–126] for the case [Formula: see text].

INTERSECTION COHOMOLOGY OF THE MODULI SPACE OF HIGGS BUNDLES ON A GENUS 2 CURVE

Let C be a smooth projective curve of genus $2$ . Following a method by O’Grady, we construct a semismall desingularisation $\tilde {\mathcal {M}}_{Dol}^G$ of the moduli space $\mathcal {M}_{Dol}^G$ of semistable G-Higgs bundles of degree 0 for $G=\mathrm {GL}(2,\mathbb {C}), \mathrm {SL}(2,\mathbb {C})$ . By the decomposition theorem of Beilinson, Bernstein and Deligne, one can write the cohomology of $\tilde {\mathcal {M}}_{Dol}^G$ as a direct sum of the intersection cohomology of $\mathcal {M}_{Dol}^G$ plus other summands supported on the singular locus. We use this splitting to compute the intersection cohomology of $\mathcal {M}_{Dol}^G$ and prove that the mixed Hodge structure on it is pure, in analogy with what happens to ordinary cohomology in the smooth case of coprime rank and degree.

Good Wild Harmonic Bundles and Good Filtered Higgs Bundles

We prove the Kobayashi-Hitchin correspondence between good wild harmonic bundles and polystable good filtered λ-flat bundles satisfying a vanishing condition. We also study the correspondence for good wild harmonic bundles with the homogeneity with respect to a group action, which is expected to provide another way to construct Frobenius manifolds.