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].

A nonlinear theory of distributional geometry

This paper builds on the theory of nonlinear generalized functions begun in Nigsch & Vickers (Nigsch, Vickers 2021 Proc. R. Soc. A 20200640 ( doi:10.1098/rspa.2020.0640 )) and extends this to a diffeomorphism-invariant nonlinear theory of generalized tensor fields with the sheaf property. The generalized Lie derivative is introduced and shown to commute with the embedding of distributional tensor fields and the generalized covariant derivative commutes with the embedding at the level of association. The concept of a generalized metric is introduced and used to develop a non-smooth theory of differential geometry. It is shown that the embedding of a continuous metric results in a generalized metric with well-defined connection and curvature and that for C 2 metrics the embedding preserves the curvature at the level of association. Finally, we consider an example of a conical metric outside the Geroch–Traschen class and show that the curvature is associated to a delta function.