Quadratic harmonic morphisms and O-systems

Abstract

We introduce O-systems (Definition \ref{DO}) of orthogonal transformations of ${\Bbb R}^{m}$, and establish $1-1$ correspondences both between equivalence classes of Clifford systems and that of O-systems, and between O-systems and orthogonal multiplications of the form $\mu :{\Bbb R}^{n} \times {\Bbb R}^{m} \longrightarrow {\Bbb R}^{m} $, which allow us to solve the existence problems both for O-systems and for umbilical quadratic harmonic morphisms (Theorems \ref{ES} and \ref{EU}) simultaneously. The existence problem for general quadratic harmonic morphisms is then solved (Theorem \ref{EG}) by the Splitting Lemma (Lemma \ref{Split}). We also study properties (see, e.g., Theorems \ref{single} and \ref{TL}) possessed by all quadratic harmonic morphisms for fixed pairs of domain and range spaces (\S5).