Biharmonic maps from tori into a 2-sphere

Abstract

Biharmonic maps are generalizations of harmonic maps. A well-known result of Eells and Wood on harmonic maps between surfaces shows that there exists no harmonic map from a torus into a sphere (whatever the metrics chosen) in the homotopy class of maps of Brower degree $\pm 1$. It would be interesting to know if there exists any biharmonic map in that homotopy class of maps. In this paper, we obtain some classifications on biharmonic maps from a torus into a sphere, where the torus is provided with a flat or a class of non-flat metrics whilst the sphere is provided with the standard metric. Our results show that there exists no proper biharmonic maps of degree $\pm 1$ in a large family of maps from a torus into a sphere.