Asymptotic behavior of minimizing $p$-harmonic maps when $p \nearrow 2$ in dimension 2

Abstract

We study $p$--harmonic maps with Dirichlet boundary conditions from a planar domain into a general compact Riemannian manifold. We show that as $p$ approaches $2$ from below, they converge up to a subsequence to a minimizing singular renormalizable harmonic map. The singularities are imposed by topological obstructions to the existence of harmonic mappings; the location of the singularities being governed by a renormalized energy. Our analysis is based on lower bounds on growing balls and also yields some uniform weak-$L^p$ bounds (also known as Marcinkiewicz or Lorentz $L^{p,\infty}$).