Stable harmonic maps from pinched manifolds (Q1103926)

It is proved that for \(n\geq 3\) there exists a constant \(\delta\) (n) with \(1/4\leq \delta (n)<1\) such that if M is a simply connected Riemannian manifold of dimension n with \(\delta\) (n)-pinched curvatures then for every Riemannian manifold N every stable harmonic map \(\phi\) : \(M\to N\) is constant. The proof is completely different from that of the author's previous paper and here the pinching constants are easy to compute by elementary functions.