Vortices over Riemann surfaces and dominated splittings

Abstract

We associate a flow $\phi$ to a solution of the vortex equations on a closed oriented Riemannian 2-manifold $(M,g)$ of negative Euler characteristic and investigate its properties. We show that $\phi$ always admits a dominated splitting and identify special cases in which $\phi$ is Anosov. In particular, starting from holomorphic differentials of fractional degree, we produce novel examples of Anosov flows on suitable roots of the unit tangent bundle of $(M,g)$.