Stability of natural energy functionals at Riemannian subimmersions (Q2571479)

For \(\Phi\) a function on the symmetric matrices which is invariant under conjugation by orthogonal matrices, the \(\Phi\)-energy of a smooth mapping between Riemannian manifolds is (well-)defined to be \(E_{\Phi}(f):=\int\Phi(df^*df)\). The most prominent examples are the energy \(\int| df| ^2\), the volume, and the Jacobians. For the \(\Phi\)-energies, the first and second variation are computed. This results in some stability criteria for these energies at Riemannian subimmersions.