Potential Analysis 2: 295-298, 1993.
© 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
295
A Note on the Classification of Holomorphic Harmonic
Morphisms
SIGMUNDUR GUDMUNDSSON* and RAGNAR SIGURDSSON
Science Institute, University of Iceland, Dunhaoa 3, 107 Reykjavik, Iceland.
(Received: 20 January 1993)
Abstract. In this note we give a complete classification of those holomorphie maps q~: U---~C" defined on
open and connected subsets of C" which are harmonic morphisms.
Mathematics Subject Classifications (1991). 58E20, 58G32, 32A10.
Key words. Harmonic morphisms, Brownian motions, holomorphic maps.
O. Introduction
Let (M", O) and (N", h) be Riemannian manifolds. A map 4~:(M, 9)----~ (N, h) is called
a harmonic morphism if for any harmonic function f: U ~ ~ defined on an open subset
U of N with ~b-l(U) non-empty, fo~b:~b-l(U)--~ is a harmonic function. An
alternative description of non-constant harmonic morphisms is that they map
Brownian motions on (M, O) to Brownian motions on (N, h), see [6]. If m < n then
every harmonic morphism ~b:(M, 9)--~ (N, 9) is constant, hence not of interest. If m ~> n
then a non-constant harmonic morphism ~b:(M, 9)--' (N, O) is surjeetive outside the
critical set C¢~ := {x ~ M Id~b~ = 0), which has a dense complement M* := M - C a-
In [9] and [10] Fuglede and Ishihara independently characterized harmonic
morphisms as those harmonic maps which are horizontally conformal in the following
sense: At each point p e M* let ~ be the vertical space at p given by ~ := Ker dckp c TpM
and Yt],:= ~1 be the horizontal space. Here I denotes the orthogonal complement
with respect to the metric g on M. The map 4~:(M, g) ~ (N, g) is said to be horizontally
conformal if there exists a function 2:M*--~ + such that 22g(X,Y)=
h(d4)(X), dck(Y)) for all X, Y~ oug.
In recent years a substantial progress has been made in the field of harmonic
morphisms, see for example El-3], [5], [7], ['8] and [11]. Concerning this work it
is observed in [9], as a direct consequence of the Cauchy-Riemann equations, that
* The first author was supported by the Icelandic Science Fund.