On the Sacks-Uhlenbeck flow of Riemannian surfaces

Abstract

In this paper, we study an $\alpha$-flow for the Sack-Uhlenbeck functional on Riemannian surfaces and prove that the limiting map by the $\alpha$-flows is a weak solution to the harmonic map flow. By an application of the $\alpha$-flow, we present a simple proof of an energy identity of a minimizing sequence in each homotopy class.