A note on the nonexistence of quasi-harmonic spheres (Q514273)

The heat flow was introduced by Eells and Sampson to show existence of a harmonic map between Riemannian manifolds. In fact, they proved that the heat flow has a global solution which subconverges strongly to a harmonic map at time infinity if the sectional curvature of the target manifold is non-positive. However, in general, the heat flow may produce singularities at a finite time. One of this singularity type is associated to quasi-harmonic spheres. A quasi-harmonic sphere is a non-constant harmonic map from \(({\mathbb R}^m, \tilde g)\) with \(m >2\) to a Riemannian manifold, where \(\tilde g\) is a metric conformal to the flat metric \(g_0\) given by \(\tilde g = \exp(-|x|^2/2(m-2))g_0\). Recall that a harmonic sphere is a harmonic map from a sphere to a Riemannian manifold. There are some known results on harmonic spheres and quasi-harmonic spheres. The first author and \textit{M. Wang} [J. Eur. Math. Soc. (JEMS) 11, No. 1, 207--221 (2009; Zbl 1169.58002)] proved that there are no non-constant quasi-harmonic spheres with images in a regular ball. The first author and \textit{X. Zhu} [Calc. Var. Partial Differ. Equ. 37, No. 3--4, 441--460 (2010; Zbl 1208.58017)] proved that if the heat flow has a global solution and there is no harmonic map from \(S^l\) to \(N\) for \(2 \leq l \leq m-1\), then this flow subconverges in \(C^2\)-norm to a smooth harmonic map at infinity. They also showed that the heat flow exists globally provided that the universal cover \(\widetilde N\) of \(N\) admits a strictly convex positive function \(\rho\) with polynomial growth. The first author and \textit{Y. Yang} [Manuscr. Math. 138, No. 1--2, 161--169 (2012; Zbl 1239.58008)] generalized Li-Zhu's results to the case of quasi-harmonic sphere with large energy condition under the same assumption on \(\rho\). The large energy condition is defined by \[ \lim_{R\to \infty} R^m e^{-{R^2}/4} \int_{B_R(0)} \frac{1}{2}|du|^2 e^{- {|x|^2}/4}\, dx =0. \] In this paper, the authors generalize Li-Zhu's result on non-existence of harmonic spheres to quasi-harmonic spheres. The authors prove that if there is a non-negative strictly convex function \(\rho\) on the universal cover of the target manifold \(N\) satisfying \[ \rho (y) \leq C \exp \left(\frac{1}{4}\tilde d (y)^{2/m}\right), \quad \forall y \in \widetilde N \text{ with } m \geq 3, \] then there are no non-constant quasi-harmonic spheres from \({\mathbb R}^m\) to \(N\).