Restriction of Donaldson's functional to diagonal metrics on Higgs bundles with non-holomorphic Higgs fields

Abstract We consider a Higgs bundle over a compact K\"ahler manifold with a smooth, non-holomorphic Higgs field. We assume that the holomorphic vector bundle decomposes into a direct sum of holomorphic line bundles. Under an assumption on the zero set of the non-holomorphic Higgs field, we provide some necessary and sufficient conditions for Donaldson's functional which is restricted to the set of diagonal Hermitian metrics associated with a holomorphic decomposition of the vector bundle to attain a minimum. In particular, when the holomorphic vector bundle decomposes into a direct sum of holomorphic line bundles, we show that we can solve the Hermitian-Einstein equation under a strong assumption even if the Higgs field is non-holomorphic. MSC Classification: 53C07 , 58E15