On the Morse index of harmonic maps and minimal immersions

In this paper we are concerned with harmonic maps and minimal immersions defined on compact Riemannian manifolds and with values in homogenous strongly harmonic manifolds. We show some results on the Morse index by varying these maps along suitable conformal vector fields. We obtain also that they are global maxima on some subspaces of the eigenspaces corresponding to the nonvanishing eigenvalues of the Laplacian operator on the target manifolds.