English

Construction of harmonic coordinates for weak immersions

Differential Geometry 2025-10-14 v1 Analysis of PDEs

Abstract

We prove that any weak immersion in the critical Sobolev space Wn2+1,2(Rn;Rd)W^{\frac{n}{2}+1,2}(\mathbb{R}^n;\mathbb{R}^d) in even dimension n4n\geq 4, has global harmonic coordinates if its second fundamental form is small in the Sobolev space Wn21,2(Rn;Rd)W^{\frac{n}{2}-1,2}(\mathbb{R}^n;\mathbb{R}^d). This is a generalization to arbitrary even dimension n4n\ge 4 of a famous result of M\"uller--Sverak \cite{muller1995} for n=2n=2. The existence of such coordinates is a key tool used by the authors in \cite{MarRiv20252} for the analysis of scale-invariant Lagrangians of immersions, such as the Graham--Reichert functional. From a purely intrinsic perspective, the proof of the main result leads to a general local existence theorem of harmonic coordinates for general metrics with Riemann tensor in LpL^p for any p>n/2p>n/2 in any dimension n3n\geq 3.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.10601,
  title  = {Construction of harmonic coordinates for weak immersions},
  author = {Dorian Martino and Tristan Rivière},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.10601},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:32:15.961Z