O'Grady spaces and symplectic resolution of moduli spaces of Higgs bundles

Abstract

We describe here a degeneration of the symplectic desingularization of the moduli spaces of topologically trivial $GL(2,\mathbb{C})$ and $SL(2,\mathbb{C})$-Higgs bundles over a hyperelliptic curve, into O'Grady's ten and six dimensional exceptional examples of irreducible holomorphic symplectic manifolds. Most of this note is a survey of work on these degenerations by Donagi-Ein-Lazarsfeld, de Cataldo-Maulik-Shen and Felissetti-Mauri, although in certain cases we provide details that were missing the previous articles.