l-Adic local systems and Higgs bundles

In 1981, Drinfeld enumerated the number of irreducible l-adic local systems of rank two on a projective smooth curve in positive characteristic fixed by the Frobenius endomorphism. Interestingly, this number bears resemblance to the number of points on a variety over a finite field. Deligne proposed conjectures to extend and comprehend Drinfeld’s result. In this talk, I will present Deligne’s conjectures and discuss some mysterious phenomena that have emerged in various cases where this number is related to the number of stable Higgs bundles.