Harmonic maps in unfashionable geometries

We describe some general constructions on a real smooth projective 4-quadric which provide analogues of the Willmore functional and conformal Gauss map in both Lie sphere and projective differential geometry. Extrema of these functionals are characterized by harmonicity of this Gauss map.Comment: plain TeX, uses bbmsl for blackboard bold, 20 page

Formal conserved quantities for isothermic surfaces

Isothermic surfaces in $S^n$ are characterised by the existence of a pencil $\nabla^t$ of flat connections. Such a surface is special of type $d$ if there is a family $p(t)$ of $\nabla^t$-parallel sections whose dependence on the spectral parameter $t$ is polynomial of degree $d$. We prove that any isothermic surface admits a family of $\nabla^t$-parallel sections which is a formal Laurent series in $t$. As an application, we give conformally invariant conditions for an isothermic surface in $S^3$ to be special.Comment: 13 page

Harmonic Riemannian submersions between Riemannian symmetric spaces of noncompact type

We construct harmonic Riemannian submersions that are retractions from symmetric spaces of noncompact type onto their rank-one totally geodesic subspaces. Among the consequences, we prove the existence of a non-constant, globally defined complex-valued harmonic morphism from the Riemannian symmetric space associated to a split real semisimple Lie group. This completes an affirmative proof of a conjecture of Gudmundsson

Isothermic surfaces and conservation laws

For CMC surfaces in $3$-dimensional space forms, we relate the moment class of Korevaar--Kusner--Solomon to a second cohomology class arising from the integrable systems theory of isothermic surfaces. In addition, we show that both classes have a variational origin as Noether currents

Isothermic submanifolds of symmetric RR-spaces

We extend the classical theory of isothermic surfaces in conformal 3-space, due to Bour, Christoffel, Darboux, Bianchi and others, to the more general context of submanifolds of symmetric $R$-spaces with essentially no loss of integrable structure.Comment: 35 pages, 3 figures. v2: typos and other infelicities corrected

Discrete Ω\Omega-nets and Guichard nets

We provide a convincing discretisation of Demoulin's $\Omega$-surfaces along with their specialisations to Guichard and isothermic surfaces with no loss of integrable structure.Comment: 39 A4 page

Constructing solutions to the Bj\"orling problem for isothermic surfaces by structure preserving discretization

In this article, we study an analog of the Bj\"orling problem for isothermic surfaces (that are more general than minimal surfaces): given a real analytic curve $\gamma$ in ${\mathbb R}^3$, and two analytic non-vanishing orthogonal vector fields $v$ and $w$ along $\gamma$, find an isothermic surface that is tangent to $\gamma$ and that has $v$ and $w$ as principal directions of curvature. We prove that solutions to that problem can be obtained by constructing a family of discrete isothermic surfaces (in the sense of Bobenko and Pinkall) from data that is sampled along $\gamma$, and passing to the limit of vanishing mesh size. The proof relies on a rephrasing of the Gauss-Codazzi-system as analytic Cauchy problem and an in-depth-analysis of its discretization which is induced from the geometry of discrete isothermic surfaces. The discrete-to-continuous limit is carried out for the Christoffel and the Darboux transformations as well.Comment: 29 pages, some figure