Unifying Geometric Perspectives on Hitchin's Moduli Space
Bernoulli Center, Lausanne
10 - 14 August, 2026
Bernoulli Center, Lausanne
10 - 14 August, 2026
Since its appearance in Hitchin's seminal work, the moduli space of Higgs bundles on a Riemann surface has occupied a central position in algebraic geometry, representation theory, mathematical physics, and low-dimensional topology. In the same paper, Hitchin identifies and exploits the rich geometric structure of his moduli space as an algebraic variety, a symplectic manifold, and a hyperKähler manifold.
After 40 years, each of these perspectives have led to dedicated communities with distinct language, priorities, and expertise. We hope that by assembling modern experts interested in the same space, we will discover and inspire new collaborations and novel directions .
François Labourie (Higher Teichmüller theory and Θ-positivity)
Peter Smillie (Harmonic maps and Hitchin's equation)
Yu Zhao (Derived algebraic geometry and shifted symplectic stacks)
Samuel Bronstein (École Normale Supérieure)
Colin Davalo (University of Torino)
Alexander Früh (University of Birmingham)
Guillermo Gallego (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
Miguel González (ICMAT)
Robert Hanson (Imperial College London)
Enya Hsiao (MPI Leipzig)
Elsa Maneval (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)
Junming Zhang (CIM Nankai University)
Eric Y. Chen (EPFL Lausanne)
Mengxue Yang (Kavli IPMU)
Bernoulli Center for Fundamental Studies