Immersions of surfaces in spin$^c$-manifolds with Higgs fields

Abstract

We define a `Higgs field' for a four-dimensional spin$^c$-manifold to be a smooth section of its positive half-spinor bundle, transverse to the zero section, and defined only up to a positive functional factor. This is intended to be a generalization of almost complex structures on real four-manifolds, each of which may in fact be treated as a Higgs field without zeros for a specific spin$^c$-structure. The notions of totally real or pseudoholomorphic immersions of real surfaces in an almost complex manifold of real dimension four have straighforward generalizations to the case of a spin$^c$-manifold with a Higgs field. Our results consist, first, in showing that totally real immersions of closed oriented surfaces in four-dimensional spin$^c$-manifolds with Higgs fields have, basically, the same properties as in the almost-complex case, and, secondly, in providing a description of all pseudoholomorphic immersions of such surfaces in the four-sphere endowed with a "standard" Higgs field.