Asymptotics of the Teichmüller harmonic map flow

The Teichmüller harmonic map flow, introduced by Rupflin and Topping (2012) [11], evolves both a map from a closed Riemann surface to an arbitrary compact Riemannian manifold, and a constant curvature metric on the domain, in order to reduce its harmonic map energy as quickly as possible. In this paper, we develop the geometric analysis of holomorphic quadratic differentials in order to explain what happens in the case that the domain metric of the flow degenerates at infinite time. We obtain a branched minimal immersion from the degenerate domain.