Perturbing away singularities of harmonic maps (Q915118)

The question of persistence or otherwise of singularities of minimal surfaces, harmonic maps, and the extrema of other geometric variational problems has been studied in some detail by various authors in recent times, and is now partly understood in various simple cases. In a previous paper of the first author [J. Reine Angew. Math. 377, 210- 218 (1987; Zbl 0608.49029)] it was proved that, given a codimension 1 area-minimizing cone \(C\subset R^{n+1}\) with an isolated singularity at the vertex \(x=0\), the singularity of \(C_ 1\equiv C\cap \{x:| x| \leq 1\}\) can be perturbed away by suitably small perturbations of the boundary \(\Sigma\equiv C\cap S^{n-1}\), provided the perturbation of \(\Sigma\) favors, at least slightly, one side of \(\Sigma\) over the other. This result extended work of \textit{R. Hardt} and the second author [ibid. 362, 102-129 (1985)], which dealt with the case when the perturbation of \(\Sigma\) was entirely ``one-sided.'' Our aim here is to prove that an analogous result applies to certain homogeneous degree zero energy minimizing harmonic maps from \(R^ n\) into suitable compact convex target manifolds. In particular our results apply to perturbations of the ``equator map'' \(\phi\) : \(B^ n\sim \{0\}\to S^{n-1}\subset S^ p\) (given by \(x\mapsto | x|^{- 1}x)\) in case \(n\geq 7\).