Vortices over Riemann surfaces and dominated splittings

We associate a flow $\phi $ with a solution of the vortex equations on a closed oriented Riemannian 2-manifold $(M,g)$ of negative Euler characteristic and investigate its properties. We show that $\phi $ always admits a dominated splitting and identify special cases in which $\phi $ is Anosov. In particular, starting from holomorphic differentials of fractional degree, we produce novel examples of Anosov flows on suitable roots of the unit tangent bundle of $(M,g)$ .