Sharp quantitative rigidity results for maps from $S^2$ to $S^2$ of general degree

Abstract

As the energy of any map $v$ from $S^2$ to $S^2$ is at least $4\pi |deg(v)|$ with equality if and only if $v$ is a rational map one might ask whether maps with small energy defect ${\delta }_v=E(v)-4\pi |deg(v)|$ are necessarily close to a rational map. While such a rigidity statement turns out to be false for maps of general degree, we will prove that any map $v$ with small energy defect is essentially given by a collection of rational maps that describe the behaviour of $v$ at very different scales and that the corresponding distance is controlled by a quantitative rigidity estimate of the form $dis{t}^2\le C{\delta }_v(1+|\log {\delta }_v|)$ which is indeed sharp.