BUBBLING OF THE HEAT FLOWS FOR HARMONIC MAPS FROM SURFACES

In this article we prove that any Palais-Smale sequence of the energy functional on surfaces with uniformily L(2)-bounded tension fields con verges pointwise, by taking a subsequence if necessary, to a map from connected (possibly singular) surfaces, which consist of the original surfaces and finitely many bubble trees. We therefore get the correspo nding results about how the solutions of heat flow for harmonic maps f rom surfaces form singularities at infinite time. (C) 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.