Spiral Harmonic Products

Abstract

Motivated by the systematic study of spiral minimal products, we consider harmonic maps obtained by coupling two spherical eigenmaps through a profile curve in $\mathbb S^3$, with a doubly warped product metric on the source. The source warps are independent of the profile magnitudes. This gives two complementary problems: reconstructing a compatible source metric from prescribed profile or source data, and finding closed profiles when the source metric is fixed. For arbitrary prescribed warps, homogenization of the reduced Lagrangian gives a strongly convex conic Finsler metric whose oriented graph geodesics are exactly the harmonic profiles. In the unit-speed inverse problem, the phase momenta reduce reconstruction to a scalar magnitude equation. We obtain global reconstructions from a prescribed magnitude, one source warp, or a monotone volume factor, together with periodic families in which profiles closing on finite covers are dense. In the fixed-metric problem, a change of time gives an autonomous Neumann system. One fixed source metric then carries continuous families of closed profiles and infinitely many closed graph geodesics. For fixed even $p,q\geq 2$, every fixed metric in this Neumann class on $\mathbb S^1\times\mathbb S^p\times\mathbb S^q$ supports harmonic maps into $\mathbb S^{p+q+1}$ of degree $4m$ for every $m\geq 1$. In the matched constant-warp case, these maps reduce to explicit eigenmaps.