Pseudo-harmonic maps from closed pseudo-Hermitian manifolds to Riemannian manifolds with nonpositive sectional curvature

In this paper, we use heat flow method to prove the existence of pseudo-harmonic maps from closed pseudo-Hermitian manifolds to Riemannian manifolds with nonpositive sectional curvature, which is a generalization of Eells–Sampson’s existence theorem. Furthermore, when the target manifold has negative sectional curvature, we analyze horizontal energy of geometric homotopy of two pseudo-harmonic maps and obtain that if the image of a pseudo-harmonic map is neither a point nor a closed geodesic, then it is the unique pseudo-harmonic map in the given homotopic class. This is a generalization of Hartman’s theorem.