A construction of biharmonic maps into homogeneous spaces (Q402734)

Biharmonic maps are the critical points of a functional involving the second derivatives of maps between two Riemannian manifolds, so they are the solutions (minimizers) of some variational problem. But they are difficult to study with variational methods, in part due to the lack of coercivity of the underlying functional. Recently, P. Hornung was able to apply the direct method to a modified functional under the assumption that the dimension of the domain is 3 or 4. In this paper, the corresponding minimizers are studied in the case of a compact homogeneous Riemannian target manifold. It is shown that they also represent minimizers of the original functional among a suitable class of comparison maps. Moreover, they solve the corresponding Euler-Lagrange equation if it is interpreted in a sufficiently weak sense.