Blowup behavior of harmonic maps with finite index (Q1674633)

The authors study the blowup phenomena of \(\alpha_k\)-harmonic sequences with uniformly bounded \(\alpha_k\)-energy, from a compact Riemann surface \(\Sigma\) to a compact Riemannian manifold \(N\). They show that if the Ricci curvature of the target manifold \(N\) has a positive lower bound and the Morse indices of the \(\alpha_k\)-harmonic maps are bounded, then the blowup phenomena occur as \(\alpha_k \to 1\). Moreover, the limiting necks of the sequence are geodesics of finite length, from which the energy identity follows. Similar results are obtained for a sequence of harmonic maps \(u_k : (\Sigma, h_k) \rightarrow N\), when the conformal class of the metric \(h_k\) diverges.