Advanced topics in gauge theory: mathematics and physics of Higgs bundles

Abstract: These notes have been prepared as reading material for the mini-course given by the author at the "2019 Graduate Summer School" at Park City Mathematics Institute - Institute for Advanced Study. We begin by introducing Higgs bundles and their main properties (Lecture 1), and then we discuss the Hitchin fibration and its different uses (Lecture 2). The second half of the course is dedicated to studying different types of subspaces (branes) of the moduli space of complex Higgs bundles, their appearances in terms of flat connections and representations (Lecture 3), as well as correspondences between them (Lecture 4).