The regularity of harmonic maps into spheres and applications to Bernstein problems (Q431624)

It is well-known that harmonic maps from Euclidean spaces into spheres need not be regular even though they have finite energy on finite balls for dimension greater than or equal to \(3\). The basic example is the normalized position vector \(\frac{x}{|x|} : {\mathbb R}^n \to S^{n-1}\). Since \(S^{n-1}\) can be considered as an embedding equator into \(S^n\), we have a singular harmonic map from \({\mathbb R}^n\) to the sphere \(S^n\) with image contained in an equator. In contrast to this phenomenon, Hildebrandt-Kaul-Widman proved the regularity of weakly harmonic maps whose image is contained in some compact subset of an open hemisphere. In this paper, the authors prove the regularity for weakly harmonic maps from a Riemannian manifold into a Euclidean sphere under the assumption that the image avoids some neighborhood of a half-equator. They also derive a priori estimates for such weakly harmonic maps. The proofs combine constructions of strictly convex functions and the regularity theory of quasilinear elliptic systems. Applying their results to the spherical and Euclidean Bernstein problems for minimal hypersurfaces, the authors obtain new conditions under which compact minimal hypersurfaces in the sphere or complete minimal hypersurfaces in Euclidean space are trivial.