Short time existence for harmonic map heat flow with time-dependent metrics

Abstract: In this work, we obtain a short time existence result for harmonic map heat flow coupled with a smooth family of complete metrics in the domain manifold. Our results generalize short time existence results for harmonic map heat flow by Li-Tam [The heat equation and harmonic maps of complete manifolds, Invent. Math., 1991] and Chen-Zhu [Uniqueness of the Ricci flow on complete noncompact manifolds, J. Differential Geometry, 2006]. In particular, we prove the short time existence of harmonic map heat flow along a complete Ricci flow $g(t)$ on $M$ into a complete manifold with curvature bounded from above with a smooth initial map of uniformly bounded energy density, under the assumptions that $|\text{Rm}(g(t))|\leq a/t$ and $g(t)$ is uniformly equivalent to $g(0)$.