All harmonic 2-spheres in the unitary group, completely explicitly (Q604227)

\textit{K. Uhlenbeck} [J. Differ. Geom. 30, No. 1, 1--50 (1989; Zbl 0677.58020)] showed how to construct all harmonic maps from the \(2\)-sphere to the unitary group \(U(n)\), equipped with its standard bi-invariant metric, so called a process adding a uniton or flag transformation. But since successive holomorphic structures causing by adding a uniton coming from current harmonic map were found in terms of the previous one and the solution to a \(\overline{\partial}\)-problem, no explicit solutions could be given in general. In this paper, the authors could find the next holomorphic structure explicitly just by using suitable projections of meromorphic functions and build harmonic maps explicitly in terms of freely chosen meromorphic functions and their derivatives. For \(r \in \{0, 1, \cdots, n-1\}\), let \((H_{i,j})_{0 \leq i \leq r-1, 1\leq j \leq n}\) be an \(r\times n\) array of \({\mathbb C}^n\)-valued meromorphic functions on a surface \(M^2\), and let \(\varphi_0\) be an element of \(U(n)\). For each \(i=0, 1, \cdots, r-1\), set \(\underline{\alpha}_{i+1}\) equal to the subbundle of \(M \times {\mathbb C}^n\) spanned by the vectors \(K^{(k)}_{i,j} = \sum_{s=k}^i C_s^i H^{(k)}_{s-k, j}, j = 1, \cdots, n, k = 0, 1, \cdots, i\), where \(H^{(k)}_{s-k, j}\) is the \(k\)-th derivative with respect to some local complex coordinate on \(M\). Under these situations, the authors proved that the map \(\varphi : M \to U(n)\) defined by \(\varphi = \varphi_0(\pi_1-\pi_1^\perp)\cdots (\pi_r - \pi_r^\perp)\) is harmonic, where \(\pi_i\) and \(\pi_i^\perp\) are the projections onto the subbundle \(\underline{\alpha}_i\) and its orthogonal complement, respectively. Further, all harmonic maps from \(M \to U(n)\) of finite uniton number, and so all harmonic maps from \(S^2\) to \(U(n)\) are obtained in this way. Recall that a harmonic map from a surface is said to be of finite uniton number if there exists a factorization into a finite number of unitons. They also gave an explanation how any possible factorization by covering unitons is given by their data.