Minimal Lagrangian surfaces in $${\mathbb {CH}^2}$$ and representations of surface groups into SU(2, 1)

Abstract

We use an elliptic differential equation of Ţiţeica (or Toda) type to construct a minimal Lagrangian surface in $${\mathbb {CH}^2}$$ from the data of a compact hyperbolic Riemann surface and a cubic holomorphic differential. The minimal Lagrangian surface is equivariant for an SU(2, 1) representation of the fundamental group. We use this data to construct a diffeomorphism between a neighbourhood of the zero section in a holomorphic vector bundle over Teichmuller space (whose fibres parameterise cubic holomorphic differentials) and a neighborhood of the $${\mathbb {R}}$$ -Fuchsian representations in the SU(2, 1) representation space. We show that all the representations in this neighbourhood are complex-hyperbolic quasi-Fuchsian by constructing for each a fundamental domain using an SU(2, 1) frame for the minimal Lagrangian immersion: the Maurer–Cartan equation for this frame is the Ţiţeica-type equation. A very similar equation to ours governs minimal surfaces in hyperbolic 3-space, and our paper can be interpreted as an analog of the theory of minimal surfaces in quasi-Fuchsian manifolds, as first studied by Uhlenbeck.