Harmonicity of the Atiyah-Hitchin-Singer and Eells-Salamon almost complex structures (Q681687)

The twistor space $\mathcal{Z}$ of an even-dimensional Riemannian manifold $(M,g)$ is a bundle associated to the principal bundle of orthonormal frames on $M$ which parametrizes all pointwise linear complex structures, so that the compatible almost Hermitian structures on $M$ are sections in it. Moreover $\mathcal{Z}$ carries a natural bundle-like metric and tautologically defined almost complex structures. The twistor spaces provided some of the main examples of non-Kähler almost complex manifolds with specific properties. The authors of the paper under review have a long history of results about the twistor spaces, part of which is seen in the list of references. In the current note they address the question of extremality in general sense of the two natural almost complex structures on the twistor space of a 4-dimensional Riemannian manifold. On an almost Hermitian manifold $(M,J,g)$ one can consider two variations of the almost complex structure $J$ when it is considered as a map from the manifold $M$ to its twistor space $\mathcal{Z}$. So one can consider variations of such sections among all maps $f: M\to\mathcal{Z}$, in which case the extremal points of the corresponding energy are harmonic maps. Alternatively one can vary only among sections, in which case the extremals are called harmonic sections.\par The authors characterize the Riemannian 4-manifolds for which their 6-dimensional twistor spaces have their two natural almost Hermitian structures either harmonic as maps, or as sections. The results are based on the authors previously developed machinery and rather non-trivial calculations.