Jacobi fields along harmonic 2-spheres in 3- and 4-spheres are not all integrable

Abstract

In a previous paper, we showed that any Jacobi field along a harmonic map from the 2-sphere to the complex projective plane is integrable (i.e., is tangent to asmooth variation through harmonic maps). In this paper, in contrast, we show that there are (non-full) harmonic maps from the 2-sphere to the 3-sphere and 4-sphere which have non-integrable Jacobi fields. This is particularly surprising in the case of the 3-sphere where the space of harmonic maps of any degree is a smooth manifold, each map having image in a totally geodesic 2-sphere.