Cohomology of the moduli of Higgs bundles via positive characteristic

For any two degrees coprime to the rank, we construct a family of ring isomorphisms parameterized by GSp(2g) between the cohomology of the moduli spaces of stable Higgs bundles which preserve the perverse filtrations. As consequences, we prove two structural results concerning the cohomology of Higgs moduli which are predicted by the P=W conjecture in non-abelian Hodge theory: (1) Galois conjugation for character varieties preserves the perverse filtrations for the corresponding Higgs moduli spaces. (2) The restriction of the Hodge-Tate decomposition for a character variety to each piece of the perverse filtration for the corresponding Higgs moduli space gives also a decomposition. Our proof uses reduction to positive characteristic and relies on the non-abelian Hodge correspondence in characteristic p between Dolbeault and de Rham moduli spaces.