Harmonic maps into loop spaces of compact Lie groups (Q943418)

The paper covers several aspects of the twistor approach for the construction of harmonic maps. The targets considered are Grassmannians and infinite-dimensional variants of these. Loop spaces of compact Lie groups can be isometrically embedded into some ``Hilbert-Schmidt'' Grassmannian; therefore harmonic maps to such loop spaces can be considered as harmonic maps to Grassmannians. The latter can be constructed as projections of pseudoholomorphic maps to virtual flag manifolds. The author formulates a conjecture that may be seen as a motivation for studying harmonic maps to loop spaces. It states that the moduli space of Yang-Mills-\(G\)-fields on \(\mathbb R^4\) can be identified with the space of based harmonic maps \(\mathbb CP^1\to\Omega G\). This would generalize a result by Atiyah.