Global existence of the harmonic map heat flow into Lorentzian manifolds (Q2274101)

In this note under review, the authors give a parabolic-elliptic system for maps from a compact Riemann surface into a Lorentzian manifold with a warped product metric. They show that system turns the harmonic map type equations into a parabolic system, but keeps the v-equation as a nonlinear second-order constraint along the flow. They also prove a global existence result of the parabolic-elliptic system and show that this result implies the existence of a Lorentzian harmonic map in a given homotopy class with fixed boundary data.