Harmonic morphisms from the compact semisimple Lie groups and their non-compact duals (Q2507686)

Harmonic morphisms between (semi-)Riemannian manifolds are maps which preserve (local) harmonic functions and were characterised by Fuglede and Ishihara as horizontally weakly conformal (surjective and conformal differential) harmonic maps. When the target has dimension two, as is the case in the article under review, harmonicity of horizontally (weakly) conformal maps is equivalent to the minimality of their fibres. The question studied here is whether an irreducible Riemannian symmetric space admits, at least around any of its point, a \(\mathbb C\)-valued harmonic morphism. This is proved to be true, in a related paper of the same authors, for the following cases: \[ \begin{alignedat}{3} &\text{SO}(p+q)/\text{SO}(p) \times \text{SO}(q), &\quad&\text{SO}_{0}(p,q)/ \text{SO}(p) \times \text{SO}(q), &\quad&p\notin \{ q,q\pm 1\}, \\ &\text{SU}(p+q)/\text{S}({\text U}(p) \times {\text U}(q)), &\quad&\text{SU}(p,q)/\text{S}({\text U}(p) \times {\text U}(q)), &\quad&\forall p,q, \\ &\text{Sp}(p+q)/\text{Sp}(p) \times \text{Sp}(q), &\quad&\text{Sp}(p,q)/\text{Sp}(p) \times \text{Sp}(q), &\quad&p\neq q, \end{alignedat} \] and is extended here to the compact irreducible Riemannian symmetric spaces: \[ \text{SO}(n) ,\quad \text{SU}(n) ,\quad \text{Sp}(n) ,\quad E_{6} , \quad E_{7} , \quad E_{8} , \quad F_{4} , \quad G_{2} \] and the non-compact: \[ \text{SO}(n, \mathbb C)/\text{SO}(n) , \quad \text{SL}_{n}(n, \mathbb C)/\text{SU}(n) , \quad \text{Sp}(n, \mathbb C)/\text{Sp}(n) , \quad E_{6}^{\mathbb C}/E_{6} , \quad E_{7}^{\mathbb C}/E_{7} . \] The method used consists of constructing orthogonal harmonic families on a Riemannian manifold, i.e. \(\mathbb C\)-valued functions on \(M\) whose (complex) gradients are orthogonal and isotropic. These families are exhibited for compact spaces and a dualisation process covers the non-compact cases, for which solutions are shown to be globally defined.