Abstract
We study harmonic maps from Riemannian manifolds into arbitrary non-positively curved and CAT(\(-\,1\)) metric spaces. First we discuss the domain variation formula with special emphasis on the error terms. Expanding higher order terms of this and other formulas in terms of curvature, we prove an analogue of the Eells–Sampson Bochner formula in this more general setting. In particular, we show that harmonic maps from spaces of non-negative Ricci curvature into non-positively curved spaces have subharmonic energy density. When the domain is compact the energy density is constant, and if the domain has a point of positive Ricci curvature every harmonic map into an NPC space must be constant.
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank George Daskalopoulos for suggesting the problem, Chikako Mese for her sustained interest and many helpful comments, as well as Jingyi Chen for his comments and encouragement. He also thanks the referee for their suggestions adding to the clarity of the paper.
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Communicated by R.Schoen.
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