Higgs bundles, pseudo-hyperbolic geometry and maximal representations

These notes are an extended version of a talk given by the author in the seminar “Theorie Spectrale et Geometrie” at the Institut Fourier in No- vember 2016. We present here some aspects of a work in collaboration with B. Collier and N. Tholozan (arXiv:1702.08799). We describe how Higgs bundle theory and pseudo-hyperbolic geometry interfere in the study of maximal representations into Hermitian Lie groups of rank 2.