Harmonic flow of geometric structures

We give a twistorial interpretation of geometric structures on a Riemannian manifold, as sections of homogeneous fibre bundles, following an original insight by Wood (Differ Geom Appl 19:193–210, 2003). The natural Dirichlet energy induces an abstract harmonicity condition, which gives rise to a geometric gradient flow. We establish a number of analytic properties for this flow, such as uniqueness, smoothness, short-time existence, and some sufficient conditions for long-time existence. This description potentially subsumes a large class of geometric PDE problems from different contexts. As applications, we recover and unify a number of results in the literature: for the isometric flow of \(\text {G}_2\)-structures, by Grigorian (Adv Math 308:142–207, 2017; Calculas Variat Partial Differ Equ 58:157, 2019), Bagaglini (J Geom Anal, 2009), and Dwivedi-Gianniotis-Karigiannis (J Geom Anal 31(2):1855-1933, 2021); and for harmonic almost complex structures, by He (Energy minimizing harmonic almost complex structures, 2019) and He-Li (Trans Am Math Soc 374(9):6179–6199, 2021). Our theory also establishes original properties regarding harmonic flows of parallelisms and almost contact structures.