Discriminant and Hodge classes on the space of Hitchin's covers

Abstract

We continue the study of the rational Picard group of the moduli space of Hitchin's spectral covers started in P. Zograf's and D. Korotkin's work [11]. In the first part of the paper we expand the ``boundary'', ``Maxwell stratum'' and ``caustic'' divisors introduced in [11] via the set of standard generators of the rational Picard group. This generalizes the result of [11], where the expansion of the full discriminant divisor (which is a linear combination of the classes mentioned above) was obtained. In the second part of the paper we derive a formula that relates two Hodge classes in the rational Picard group of the moduli space of Hitchin's spectral covers.