On the structure of $\infty$-Harmonic maps

Abstract

Let $H \in C^2(\mathbb{R}^{N \times n})$, $H\geq 0$. The PDE system \[ \label{1} A_\infty u \, :=\, \Big(H_P \otimes H_P + H [H_P]^\bot H_{PP} \Big)(Du) : D^2 u\, = \, 0 \tag{1} \] arises as the ``Euler-Lagrange PDE" of vectorial variational problems for the functional $E_{\infty}(u,Ω) = \| H(Du) \|_{L^\infty(Ω)}$ defined on maps $u : Ω\subseteq \mathbb{R}^n \longrightarrow \mathbb{R}^N$. \eqref{1} first appeared in the author's recent work \cite{K3}. The scalar case though has a long history initiated by Aronsson in \cite{A1}. Herein we study the solutions of \eqref{1} with emphasis on the case of $n=2\leq N$ with $H$ the Euclidean norm on $\mathbb{R}^{N \times n}$, which we call the ``$\infty$-Laplacian". By establishing a rigidity theorem for rank-one maps of independent interest, we analyse a phenomenon of separation of the solutions to phases with qualitatively different behaviour. As a corollary, we extend to $N \geq 2$ the Aronsson-Evans-Yu theorem regarding non-existence of zeros of $|Du|$ and prove a Maximum Principle. We further characterise all $H$ for which \eqref{1} is elliptic and also study the initial value problem for the ODE system arising for $n=1$ but with $H(\cdot,u,u')$ depending on all the arguments.