Weak compactness of wave maps and harmonic maps (Q1276063)

By exploiting the Hodge structure related to harmonic maps, \({\mathcal H}^1\) estimates for Jacobians, \({\mathcal H}^1\)-BMO (bounded mean oscillation) duality, a hyperbolic monotonicity formula and the concentration compactness method, the authors show that a weak limit of a sequence of wave maps in \((1+2)\) dimensions with uniformly bounded energy is again a wave map. They also show that translating the ideas to the elliptic situation gives a much shorter proof of the results of \textit{F. Bethuel} [Calc. Var. Partial Differ. Equ. 1, No. 3, 267-310 (1993; Zbl 0812.58018)] on Palais-Smale sequences for the harmonic map functional on two dimensional domains and on limits of almost \(H\)-surfaces.