Harmonic maps and Kaluza-Klein metrics on spheres (Q444696)

The paper concerns the study of harmonic sections in the tangent bundle \(TM\) of a Riemannian manifold \(M\). The most natural metric on \(TM\), the Sasaki metric, seems to fail to provide geometrically interesting harmonic sections. Therefore, different metrics may be interesting. Here, the authors consider Kaluza-Klein metrics and also more general ones. They obtain a variety of rigidity results and partial classifications, as well as new examples of harmonic sections. Interesting questions concern the harmonicity of quadratic and Killing vector fields.