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 existence result for the energy minimizing nodal maps. As an application, we obtain a general existence theorem for minimal surfaces with arbitrary genus in any compact Riemannian manifolds. Received: 1 April 1997; revised: 15 April 1998.