Hitchin fibrations are Ng\^{o} fibrations

Abstract

We study the geometry of the Hitchin fibration for $\mathcal{L}$-valued $G$-Higgs bundles over a smooth projective curve of genus $g$, where $G$ is a reductive group and $\mathcal{L}$ is a suitably positive line bundle. We show that the Hitchin fibration admits the structure of a weak Abelian fibration. In the case when the line bundle $\mathcal{L}$ is a twist of the canonical bundle of the curve by a (possibly empty) reduced effective divisor, we prove a cohomological bound and $\delta$-regularity of the weak Abelian fibration.