A flat Higgs bundle structure on the complexified K\"ahler cone

Abstract

We shall construct a natural Higgs bundle structure on the complexified K\"ahler cone of a compact K\"ahler manifold, which can be seen as an analogy of the classical Higgs bundle structure associated to a variation of Hodge structure. In the proof of the flat-ness of our Higgs bundle, we find a commutator identity that can be used to decode the variational properties of the polarized Hodge-Lefschetz module structure on the fibres of our Higgs bundle. Thus we can use a generalized version of Lu's Hodge metric to study the curvature property of the complexified K\"ahler cone. In particular, it implies that the above Hodge metric defines a K\"ahler metric on the complexified K\"ahler cone with negative holomorphic sectional curvature, which can be seen as a new result on Wilson's conjecture.