The gradient flow of Higgs pairs

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the gradient flow of the Yang-Mills-Higgs functional of Higgs pairs on a Hermitian vector bundle $(E,H_0)$ over a Kähler surface $(M,\omega )$, and study the asymptotic behavior of the heat flow for Higgs pairs at infinity. The main result is that the gradient flow with initial condition $(A_0,{\varphi }_0)$ converges, in an appropriate sense which takes into account bubbling phenomena, to a critical points $(A_{\infty },{\varphi }_{\infty })$ of this functional. We also prove that the limiting Higgs pair $(A_{\infty },{\varphi }_{\infty })$ can be extended smoothly to a vector bundle $E_{\infty }$ over $(M,\omega )$ , and the isomorphism class of the limiting Higgs bundle $(E_{\infty },A_{\infty },{\varphi }_{\infty })$ is given by the double dual of the graded Higgs sheaves associate to Harder-Narasimhan-Seshadri filtration of the initial Higgs bundle $(E,A_0,{\varphi }_0)$.