Compactification of moduli space of harmonic mappings

We introduce the notion of harmonic nodal maps from the stratified Riemann surfaces into any compact Riemannian manifolds and prove that the space of the energy minimizing nodal maps is sequentially compact. We also give an e xistence result for the energy minimizing nodal maps. As an application, we obtain a general existence theorem for minimal surfaces with arbitrary gen us in any compact Riemannian manifolds