Infinite energy equivariant harmonic maps, domination, and anti-de Sitter $3$-manifolds

Abstract

We generalize a well-known existence and uniqueness result for equivariant harmonic maps due to Corlette, Donaldson, and Labourie to a non-compact infinite energy setting and analyze the asymptotic behaviour of the harmonic maps. When the relevant representation is Fuchsian and has hyperbolic monodromy, our construction recovers a family of harmonic maps originally studied by Wolf. We employ these maps to solve a domination problem for representations. In particular, following ideas laid out by Deroin-Tholozan, we prove that any representation from a finitely generated free group to the isometry group of a CAT$(-1)$ Hadamard manifold is strictly dominated in length spectrum by a large collection of Fuchsian ones. As an intermediate step in the proof, we obtain a result of independent interest: parametrizations of certain Teichm{\"u}ller spaces by holomorphic quadratic differentials. The main consequence of the domination result is the existence of a new collection of anti-de Sitter $3$-manifolds. We also present an application to the theory of minimal immersions into the Grassmanian of timelike planes in $\mathbb{R}^{2,2}$.