Branched real projective structures on surfaces, cyclic Higgs Bundles and Anosov representations

We use the theory of $3$-cyclic SL(3,R)-Higgs bundles to study real branched projective structures on compact surfaces recently introduced by the authors. After fixing a Riemann surface structure on S, the Higgs bundle approach allows us, on the one hand, to construct branched structures with prescribed branching data and, on the other hand, to introduce new classes of such structures. The latter are directly related to singular hyperbolic affine spheres and carry a Blaschke metric with conical singularities. In the final part of the paper, using different methods, we prove that every Anosov surface group representation into SL(3,R) is either Hitchin or belongs to the Barbot component. As a by-product, we obtain that some of the representations associated with the branched structures constructed above are not Anosov.