The singular Hitchin fibration, cameral data, and representation theory

Abstract

We consider the Hitchin fibration on the moduli stack of Higgs bundles with arbitrary reductive structure group, and study its singular locus using the centraliser of the Higgs field. We restrict to the case where the Higgs field has constant centraliser dimension, and describe a non-abelian structure on the corresponding locus in the moduli stack. On a class of components of this locus, we construct a factorisation of the Hitchin map through an abelianised fibration, and describe the abelianised fibres with a generalisation of the cameral data of Donagi and Gaitsgory. We apply our results to Hitchin fibrations for real groups, and we also determine a connection between the geometry of the singular Hitchin fibration and the representation theory of the Lie algebra via the orbit method.