Character stacks and varieties for Riemann surfaces

Given a Riemann surface X, character stacks and varieties are geometric objects which parametrize certain representations of the fundamental group of X or, equivalently, local systems with prescribed local monodromies. These objects have a rich geometry and are related, for instance, to the moduli spaces of Higgs bundles through non abelian Hodge correspondence. The cohomology of character stacks and varieties is almost completely understood in the case of a generic choice of monodromies, thanks to the work of Hausel, Letellier and Rodriguez-Villegas and Mellit. In the non-generic case, the geometry of these objects becomes considerably more complicated and their cohomology has not been studied much until recently. In the first part of the talk, I will introduce and define character stacks and varieties and review the known results about the generic case. In the second part, I will focus on the non-generic case and give a sketch of the proof of a formula for the E-series of non-generic character stacks, which is the main result of my PhD thesis.