Lipschitz continuity of harmonic maps between Alexandrov spaces (Q1702783)

This paper is devoted to the regularity theory of harmonic maps from a domain of an Alexandrov space with curvature bounded into a complete length space of non-positive curvature in the sense of Alexandrov. This study started by \textit{J. Jost} [Calc. Var. Partial Differ. Equ. 5, No. 1, 1--19 (1997; Zbl 0868.31009)] and \textit{F. H. Lin} [in: Collection of papers on geometry, analysis and mathematical physics. In honor of Professor Gu Chaohao. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing. 114--126 (1997; Zbl 1028.58019)] independently. They proved that every energy minimizing harmonic map from an Alexandrov space with curvature bounded from below to an Alexandrov space with non-positive curvature is locally Hölder continuous. In [loc. cit.], Lin asked if the Hölder continuity can be improved to Lipschitz continuity. J. Jost also asked a similar problem about Lipschitz regularity of harmonic maps between singular spaces. The authors of the present paper give a complete resolution to it. The paper is composed of six sections. Section 1 concerns the introduction. The Section 2 contains some preparatory material on Alexandrov spaces. In the Section 3, the authors recall basis analytic results on Alexandrov spaces. In the Section 4, the concepts of energy and approximating energy are revisited. In the Section 5, basics results on existence and Hölder regularity of harmonic map into non-positive curvature spaces are recalled. The last section contains the proof of the main result of the paper. In the first step of the proof, the authors construct a family of auxiliary functions which are super-solutions of the heat equation. In the second and last step, they use the weak Harnack inequality for sub-solutions of the heat equation to complete the proof of the main result.