A new approximation of relaxed energies for harmonic maps and the Faddeev model (Q532553)

The first result provides a new approximation for the relaxed energy of the Dirichlet energy. It is also proved that the minimizers of the approximating functionals converge to a minimizer \(u\) of the relaxed energy and \(u\) is harmonic and smooth in an open subset. In the proof, it is shown, by a new approach, that the limit map \(u\) is partial regular, which is different from the method of \textit{M. Giaquinta, M. Modica} and \textit{J. Souček} [Manuscr. Math. 65, No.~4, 489--507 (1989; Zbl 0678.49006)] and does not use the concept of Cartesian currents. The first result is generalized to the case of maps between Riemannian manifolds (see also [\textit{F. Lin}, Acta Math. Sin., Engl. Ser. 15, No.~1, 25--52 (1999; Zbl 0926.49025)]). The same approximation method is applied to the study of the relaxed energy for the Faddeev model. The existence of minimizers for the relaxed energy in the class of maps with Hopf degree \(\pm 1\) is proved.