Planar minimal surfaces with polynomial growth in the Sp(4,ℝ)-symmetric space

abstract:

We study the asymptotic geometry of a family of conformally planar minimal surfaces with polynomial growth in the $\Sp(4,\R)$-symmetric space. We describe a homeomorphism between the "Hitchin component" of wild $\Sp(4,\R)$-Higgs bundles over $\CP^1$ with a single pole at infinity and a component of maximal surfaces with light-like polygonal boundary in $\h^{2,2}$. Moreover, we identify those surfaces with convex embeddings into the Grassmannian of symplectic planes of $\R^4$. We show, in addition, that our planar maximal surfaces are the local limits of equivariant maximal surfaces in $\h^{2,2}$ associated to $\Sp(4,\R)$-Hitchin representations along rays of holomorphic quartic differentials.