The Dirichlet problem for harmonic maps from Riemannian polyhedra to spaces of upper bounded curvature

Abstract

This is a continuation of the Cambridge Tract “Harmonic maps between Riemannian polyhedra”, by J. Eells and the present author. The variational solution to the Dirichlet problem for harmonic maps with countinuous boundary data is shown to be continuous up to the boundary, and thereby uniquely determined. The domain space is a compact admissible Riemannian polyhedron with boundary, while the target can be, for example, a simply connected complete geodesic space of nonpositive Alexandrov curvature; alternatively, the target may have upper bounded curvature provided that the maps have a suitably small range. Essentially in the former setting it is further shown that a harmonic map pulls convex functions in the target back to subharmonic functions in the domain.