Hitchin fibration under ramified coverings

Abstract

We are interested in studying the variation of the Hitchin fibration in moduli spaces of parabolic Higgs bundles, under the action of a ramified covering. Given a degree two map π:Y→X between compact Riemann surfaces, we may pull back a Higgs bundle from X to Y, the lifted Higgs bundle tends to have many apparent singularities, then we perform a suitable birational transformation in order to eliminate them. This correspondence preserves the Hitchin fibrations and then its restriction to a general fiber gives a map between Abelian varieties. The aim of this paper is to describe this map.