This paper aims to investigate the geometry of the moduli spaces of harmonic maps of compact Riemann surfaces into compact Lie groups or compact symmetric spaces. The approach here is to study the gauge theoretic equations for such harmonic maps and the moduli space of their solutions. We discuss the S1-action, the hyper-presymplectic structure, the energy function, the Hitchin map, the flag transforms on the moduli space, several kinds of subspaces in the moduli space, and the relationship among them, especially the structure of the critical point subset for the energy function on the moduli space. As results, we show that every uniton solution is a critical point of the energy function on the moduli space, and moreover we give a characterization of the fixed point subset fixed by S1-action in terms of a flag transform.
Harmonic Maps with Free Boundary from Degenerating Bordered Riemann Surfaces