Unstable harmonic maps into real hypersurfaces of a complex Hopf manifold (Q5949485)

Inspired by results for instability of harmonic maps into totally umbilical hypersurfaces in Riemannian manifolds, the authors study the stability problem for harmonic maps from a compact Riemannian manifold \(M\) into a totally umbilical CR-submanifold \(N\) of a Hermitian manifold \(N_0\). While neither elliptic nor hyperbolic complex space forms possess totally umbilical real hypersurfaces (by a classical result of Y. Tashiro and S. Tachibana), there is an abundance of umbilical submanifolds of locally conformally Kähler ambient spaces. Thus, it is natural to study the problem above for maps into such spaces and the authors restrict their considerations to the case when \(N_0\) is a Hopf manifold. They prove, for example, that in this case if \(N\) is tangent to the Lee vector field of \(N_0\) and \(\varphi:M\to N\) is a nonconstant harmonic map for which \((1+|H|^2)E(\varphi)> 1/8 \int_M |\varphi^{\ast}\omega|^2v_g\), then \(\varphi\) is unstable; here \(E(\varphi)\) is the energy functional, \(H\) is the mean curvature vector of \(N\) and \(\omega\) is the restriction of the Lee form of \(N_0\) to \(N\). Now suppose that \(N\) is tangent to the Lee vector field \(B_0\) of \(N_0\), \(H\) does not vanish, \(M\) is a compact strictly pseudoconvex CR-manifold and \(\varphi:M\to N\) is a pseudohermitian immersion [\textit{S. Dragomir}, Am. J. Math. 117, 169-202 (1995; Zbl 0827.32020)]. The authors prove that if, in addition, \(B_0\) is orthogonal to the CR-structure of \(N\) and \(E(\varphi)>\text{vol}(M)/[(1+|H|^2)|H|^2]\), then \(\varphi\) is an unstable harmonic map.