On Variational Approximations For Wave Maps

n this paper, we revisit the existence of global weak solutions of wave maps from $\R^n$ into the sphere $\mathbb{S}^{L-1}$, $\Box u\perp T_u \mathbb{S}^{L-1}$, by establishing it as a singular limit of maps from $\R^n\times \R_+$ to $\mathbb S^{L-1}$ that minimize elliptic regularized variational functionals that contain an exponential weight in the time direction with a small parameter $\varepsilon$, where the initial data of the Cauchy problem serve as the boundary condition. The idea went back to De Giorgi \cite{Giorgi1996}, which has been implemented by Serra and Tilli \cite{Serra-Tilli2012, Serra-Tilli2016} for certain class of nonlinear wave equations. This approach is also applicable to the $SO(m)$-target manifold.