Homotopy classes of harmonic maps of the stratified 2-spheres and applications to geometric flows (Q2509964)

The paper contributes a couple of interesting aspects to the topics of bubbling and energy levels for harmonic maps of \(S^2\). The general picture about those evolves from papers like \textit{T. H. Parker} [J. Differ. Geom. 44, No. 3, 595--633 (1996; Zbl 0874.58012)] and \textit{F. Duzaar} and \textit{E. Kuwert} [Calc. Var. Partial Differ. Equ. 6, No. 4, 285--313 (1998; Zbl 0909.49008)]. Examples have been known that, for \(M\) a suitable compact manifold, there may be an infinite sequence of maps \(S^2\to M\) belonging to pairwise different homotopy classes which is bounded in Dirichlet energy. In contrast to this, only finitely many of the corresponding homotopy classes can contain a harmonic map. The new points in the paper are the following. (1) Let \(N\) be a compact Riemannian manifold without boundary. Then for any \(C>0\), the set of harmonic maps from stratified \(2\)-spheres to \(N\) with energies \(\leq C\) contains only finitely many homotopy classes. By a stratified \(2\)-sphere, the authors mean a chain of \(2\)-spheres obtained by pinching finitely many loops on \(S^2\) to points. (2) Moreover, for any pair \((M_1,M_2)\) of closed \(3\)-manifolds, with \(M_1\neq S^3\) and \(M_2\notin\{S^3,\mathbb{R}\mathbb{P}^3\}\), the authors prove the existence of a sequence \(u_k:S^2\to M_1\#M_2\) of pairwise nonhomotopic maps which is bounded in energy. And for each of the \(u_k\), when taken as initial data for the harmonic map heat flow, the flow must develop a singularity in finite time. (3) A similar statement holds for a sequence \(w_k:S^2\to M_1\#M_2\) of embeddings with uniformly bounded area, taken as initial data for the mean curvature flow.