$\alpha$-Dirac-harmonic maps from closed surfaces

$\alpha$-Dirac-harmonic maps are variations of Dirac-harmonic maps, analogous to $\alpha$-harmonic maps that were introduced by Sacks-Uhlenbeck to attack the existence problem for harmonic maps from surfaces. For $\alpha >1$, the latter are known to satisfy a Palais-Smale condtion, and so, the technique of Sacks-Uhlenbeck consists in constructing $\alpha$-harmonic maps for $\alpha >1$ and then letting $\alpha \to 1$. The extension of this scheme to Dirac-harmonic maps meets with several difficulties, and in this paper, we start attacking those. We first prove the existence of nontrivial perturbed $\alpha$-Dirac-harmonic maps when the target manifold has nonpositive curvature. The regularity theorem then shows that they are actually smooth. By $\varepsilon$-regularity and suitable perturbations, we can then show that such a sequence of perturbed $\alpha$-Dirac-harmonic maps converges to a smooth nontrivial $\alpha$-Dirac-harmonic map.