Calibrations and Energy-Minimizing Mappings of Rank-1 Symmetric Spaces

Abstract

We prove lower bounds for energy functionals of mappings from real, complex and quaternionic projective spaces to Riemannian manifolds. For real and complex projective spaces, these lower bounds are sharp, and we characterize the family of energy minimizing maps which arise in these results. We discuss the connections between these results and several theorems and questions in systolic geometry.