Sobolev mappings between RCD spaces and applications to harmonic maps: a heat kernel approach

Harmonic maps, etc. (58E20) Methods of global Riemannian geometry, including PDE methods; curvature restrictions (53C21) Differential geometric aspects of harmonic maps (53C43) Heat and other parabolic equation methods for PDEs on manifolds (58J35)

Abstract: We investigate a Sobolev map

f

from a finite dimensional RCD space

(X, d i s t_{X}, m e a s_{X})

to a finite dimensional non-collapsed compact RCD space

(Y, d i s t_{Y}, m a t h c a l H^{N})

. If the image

f (X)

is smooth in a weak sense (which is satisfied if

f_{s h a r p} m e a s_{X}

is absolutely continuous with respect to the Hausdorff measure

m a t h c a l H^{N}

, or if

(Y, d i s t_{Y}, m a t h c a l H^{N})

is smooth in a weak sense), then the pull-back

f^{*} g_{Y}

of the Riemannian metric

g_{Y}

of

(Y, d i s t_{Y}, m a t h c a l H^{N})

is well-defined as an

L^{1}

-tensor on

X

, the minimal weak upper gradient

G_{f}

of

f

can be written by using

f^{*} g_{Y}

, and it coincides with the local slope for

m e a s_{X}

-almost everywhere points in

X

when

f

is Lipschitz. In particular the last statement gives a nonlinear analogue of Cheeger's differentiability theorem for Lipschitz functions on metric measure spaces. Moreover these results allow us to define the energy of

f

. The energy coincides with the Korevaar-Schoen energy.In order to achieve this, we use a smoothing of

g_{Y}

via the heat kernel embedding

P h i_{t} : Y h o o k r i g h t a r r o w L^{2} (Y, m a t h c a l H^{N})

, which is established by Ambrosio-Portegies-Tewodrose and the first named author. Moreover we improve the regularity of

P h i_{t}

, which plays a key role. We show also that

(Y, d i s t_{Y})

is isometric to the

N

-dimensional standard unit sphere in

m a t h b b R^{N + 1}

and

f

is a minimal isometric immersion if and only if

(X, d i s t_{X}, m e a s_{X})

is non-collapsed up to a multiplication of a constant to

m e a s_{X}

, and

f

is an eigenmap whose eigenvalues coincide with the essential dimension of

(X, d i s t_{X}, m e a s_{X})

, which gives a positive answer to a remaining problem from a previous work by the first named author.

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