A construction of conformal-harmonic maps

Abstract

Conformal harmonic maps from a 4-dimensional conformal
manifold to a Riemannian manifold are maps satisfying a
certain conformally invariant fourth order equation. We prove a general existence result for conformal harmonic maps, analogous to the Eells-Sampson theorem for harmonic maps. The proof uses a geometric flow and relies on results of Gursky-Viaclovsky and Lamm.