Geometry on Surfaces and Higgs bundles

Abstract

There are three complete plane geometries of constant curvature: spherical, Euclidean and hyperbolic geometry. We explain how a closed oriented surface can carry a geometry which locally looks like one of these. Focussing on the hyperbolic case we describe how to obtain all hyperbolic structures on a given topological surface, and how to parametrise them. Finally we introduce Higgs bundles and explain how they relate to hyperbolic surfaces. This is an expository paper and we attempt to explain everything in in as simple terms as possible. For reasons of space the references are by no means complete, but we hope the interested reader will be able to use them as a starting point for further exploration.