Biharmonic wave maps: Local wellposedness in high regularity

We show the local wellposedness of biharmonic wave maps with initial data of sufficiently high Sobolev regularity and a blow-up criterion in the sup-norm of the gradient of the solutions. In contrast to the wave maps equation we use a vanishing viscosity argument and an appropriate parabolic regularization in order to obtain the existence result. The geometric nature of the equation is exploited to prove convergence of approximate solutions, uniqueness of the limit, and continuous dependence on initial data.