Available at: http://www.ictp.trieste.it/~pub off IC/99/90 United Nations Educational Scienti c and Cultural Organization and International Atomic Energy Agency THE ABDUS SALAM INTERNATIONAL CENTRE FOR THEORETICAL PHYSICS THE STRUCTURE OF HARMONIC MORPHISMS WITH TOTALLY GEODESIC FIBRES 1 M.T. Mustafa Faculty of Engineering Sciences, GIK Institute of Enginneering Sciences and Technology, Topi-23460, N.W.F.P., Pakistan and The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy. Abstract The structure of lo cal and global harmonic morphisms b etween Riemannian manifolds, with totally geo desic bres, is investigated. It is shown that non-p ositive curvature obstructs the existence of global harmonic morphisms with totally geo desic bres and the only such maps from compact Riemannian manifolds of non-p ositive curvature are, up to a homothety, totally geo desic Riemannian submersions. Similar results are obtained for lo cal harmonic morphisms with totally geo desic bres from op en subsets of non-negatively curved compact and non-compact manifolds. During the course, of this work we prove the non-existence of submersive harmonic morphisms with totally geo desic bres from some imp ortant domains, for instance from compact lo cally symmetric spaces of non-compact typ e and op en subsets of symmetric spaces of compact typ e. MIRAMARE { TRIESTE August 1999 1 Regular Asso ciate of the Ab dus Salam ICTP. E-mail:
[email protected] 2 1. Introduction Harmonic morphisms are maps b etween Riemannian manifolds which preserve germs of har- monic functions, i.e. these lo cally pull back real-valued harmonic functions to real-valued har- monic functions.