Geometric structures for maximal representations and pencils

Abstract We study fibrations of the projective model for the symmetric space associated with $\operatorname {\mathrm {SL}}(2n,\mathbb {R})$ by codimension $2$ projective subspaces, or pencils of quadrics. In particular we show that if such a smooth fibration is equivariant with respect to a representation of a closed surface group, the representation is quasi-isometrically embedded, and even Anosov if the pencils in the image contain only nondegenerate quadrics. We use this to characterize maximal representations among representations of a closed surface group into $\operatorname {\mathrm {Sp}}(2n,\mathbb {R})$ by the existence of an equivariant continuous fibration of the associated symmetric space, satisfying an additional technical property. These fibrations extend to fibrations of the projective structures associated to maximal representations by bases of pencils of quadrics.