%0 Journal Article
%T Biharmonic maps from a 2-sphere
%A Ze-Ping Wang
%A Ye-Lin Ou
%A Han-Chun Yang
%J Mathematics
%D 2013
%I arXiv
%R 10.1016/j.geomphys.2013.12.005
%X Motivated by the rich theory of harmonic maps from a 2-sphere, we study biharmonic maps from a 2-sphere in this paper. We first derive biharmonic equation for rotationally symmetric maps between rotationally symmetric 2-manifolds. We then apply the equation to obtain a classification of biharmonic maps in a family of rotationally symmetric maps between 2-spheres. We also find many examples of proper biharmonic maps defined locally on a 2-sphere. Our results seem to suggest that any biharmonic map $S^2\longrightarrow (N^n, h)$ be a weakly conformal immersion.
%U http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.0562v2