Stratifying moduli spaces of Higgs bundles and the Hitchin morphism

We study the behavior of slope-stability of reflexive twisted sheaves over a normal projective variety $X$ under pullback along a cover. Slope-stability is always preserved if the cover does not factor via a quasi-étale cover. Fixing the rank, there is one quasi-étale cover that checks whether a twisted sheaf remains slope-stable on all Galois covers, yielding a stratification of the moduli space of slope-stable Higgs-bundles. As an application, we determine the image of the Hitchin morphism restricted to the smallest closed stratum of the Dolbeault moduli space when $X$ is smooth. This allows us to determine the image of the Hitchin morphism from the Dolbeault moduli space when $X$ is a hyperelliptic or abelian variety in characteristic $p\ge 0$. In particular, we show that Chen-Ngô’s conjecture holds for hyperelliptic varieties in characteristic $0$.