A harmonic map is a smooth function between two Riemannian manifolds , which is a critical point of the Dirichlet kinetic energy functional
where is the derivative, where the norm is given jointly by the metrics of and and where the volume form is that of .
This is a standard kinetic action action functional for sigma models, the Polyakov action.
Discussion in the context of action functionals for theories of physics includes
Discussion in the context of integrable systems includes
Last revised on November 19, 2015 at 13:59:07. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.