$n$-harmonic coordinates and the regularity of conformal mappings

Tony Liimatainen, Mikko Salo

Published 2012-09-06, updated 2016-06-03Version 2

This article studies the smoothness of conformal mappings between two Riemannian manifolds whose metric tensors have limited regularity. We show that any bi-Lipschitz conformal mapping or $1$-quasiregular mapping between two manifolds with $C^r$ metric tensors ($r > 1$) is a $C^{r+1}$ conformal (local) diffeomorphism. This result was proved in [12, 27, 33], but we give a new proof of this fact. The proof is based on $n$-harmonic coordinates, a generalization of the standard harmonic coordinates that is particularly suited to studying conformal mappings. We establish the existence of a $p$-harmonic coordinate system for $1 < p < \infty$ on any Riemannian manifold.