%0 Journal Article %T Biharmonic maps and morphisms from conformal mappings %A E. Loubeau %A Y. -L. Ou %J Mathematics %D 2008 %I arXiv %X Inspired by the all-important conformal invariance of harmonic maps on two-dimensional domains, this article studies the relationship between biharmonicity and conformality. We first give a characterization of biharmonic morphisms, analogues of harmonic morphisms investigated by Fuglede and Ishihara, which, in particular, explicits the conditions required for a conformal map in dimension four to preserve biharmonicity and helps producing the first example of a biharmonic morphism which is not a special type of harmonic morphism. Then, we compute the bitension field of horizontally weakly conformal maps, which include conformal mappings. This leads to several examples of proper (i.e. non-harmonic) biharmonic conformal maps, in which dimension four plays a pivotal role. We also construct a family of Riemannian submersions which are proper biharmonic maps. %U http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1752v1