Parabolic Hitchin Maps and Their Generic Fibers

Abstract: We set up a BNR correspondence for moduli spaces of Higgs bundles over a curve with a parabolic structure over any algebraically closed field. This leads to a concrete description of generic fibers of the associated strongly parabolic Hitchin map. We also show that the global nilpotent cone is equi-dimensional with half dimension of the total space. As a result, we prove the flatness and surjectivity of this map and the existence of very stable parabolic vector bundles.