Abstract: | Both bi-harmonic maps and f-harmonic maps have some nice physical motivation and applications.Motivated largely by f-tension field not involving Riemannian curvature tensor, we attempt to formalize some large objects so as to broaden the notions of f-tension field and bi-tension field. We introduce a very large generalization of harmonic maps called f-bi-harmonic maps as the critical points of f-bi-energy functional, and then derive the Euler-Lagrange equation of f-bi-energy functional given by the vanishing of f-bi-tension field.Subsequently, we study some properties of f-bi-harmonic maps between the same dimensional manifolds and give a non-trivial example. Furthermore, we also study the basic properties of f-bi-harmonic maps on a warped product manifold so that we could find some interesting and complicated examples. |