Symmetric differentials and the dimension of Hitchin components for orbi-curves

Abstract

This note is based on a talk given at the 2019 ISAAC Congress in Aveiro, Portugal. We give an expository account of joint work with Daniele Alessandrini and Gye-Seon Lee on Hitchin components for orbifold groups (arXiv:1811.05366), recasting part of it in the language of analytic orbi-curves. This reduces the computation of the dimension of the Hitchin component for orbifold groups to an application of the orbifold Riemann-Roch theorem.