The Dirichlet principle for inner variations (Q2163404)

This article investigates the Dirichlet energy of mappings defined on domains in the complex plane. The Riemann's Dirichlet Principle states that the outer variation of a harmonic mapping increases its energy. The authors consider in this paper the inner variation and show, among other results, that in case of a simply connected domain the energy increases. This should be viewed as Riemann's Dirichlet Principle for Hopf harmonics. The authors also obtain that the second-order term of inner variation of a Hopf harmonic map is always nonnegative.