Unramified covers and branes on the Hitchin system

Abstract

We study the locus of the moduli space of GL(n,C)-Higgs bundles on a curve given by those Higgs bundles obtained by pushforward under a connected unramified cover. We equip these loci with a hyperholomorphic bundle so that they can be viewed as BBB-branes, and we introduce corresponding BAA-branes which can be described via Hecke modifications. We then show how these branes are naturally dual via explicit Fourier–Mukai transform (recall that GL(n,C) is Langlands self dual). It is noteworthy that these branes lie over the singular locus of the Hitchin fibration.As a particular case, our construction describes the behavior under mirror symmetry of the fixed loci for the action of tensorization by a line bundle of order n. These loci play a key role in the work of Hausel and Thaddeus on topological mirror symmetry for Higgs moduli spaces.