Rigidity and flatness of the image of certain classes of mappings having tangential Laplacian

Abstract: In this paper we consider the PDE system of vanishing normal projection of the Laplacian for $C^2$ maps $u : \mathbb{R}^n \supseteq \Omega \longrightarrow \mathbb{R}^N$: [ [![\mathrm{D} u]!]^\bot \Delta u = 0 \ \, \text{ in }\Omega. ] This system has discontinuous coefficients and geometrically expresses the fact that the Laplacian is a vector field tangential to the image of the mapping. It arises as a constituent component of the $p$-Laplace system for all $p\in [2,\infty]$. For $p=\infty$, the $\infty$-Laplace system is the archetypal equation describing extrema of supremal functionals in vectorial Calculus of Variations in $L^\infty$. Herein we show that the image of a solution $u$ is piecewise affine if either the rank of $\mathrm{D} u$ is equal to one or $n=2$ and $u$ has the additively separated form $u(x,y)=f(x)+g(y)$. As a consequence we obtain corresponding flatness results for the images of $p$-Harmonic maps, $p\in [2,\infty]$.