Biharmonic maps are defined as critical points of the bienergy. Every harmonic map is a stable biharmonic map. In this article, the stability of nonharmonic biharmonic Legendrian submanifolds in Sasakian space forms is discussed.

We study biminimal immersions: that is, immersions which are critical points of the bienergy for normal variations with fixed energy. We give a geometrical description of the Euler–Lagrange equation associated with biminimal immersions for both biminimal curves in a Riemannian manifold, with particular attention given to the case of curves in a space form, and isometric immersions of codimension 1 in a Riemannian manifold, in particular for surfaces of a three-dimensional manifold. We describe two methods of constructing families of biminimal surfaces using both Riemannian and horizontally homothetic submersions.

Biharmonic maps are the critical points of the bienergy functional and generalise harmonic maps. We investigate the index of a class of biharmonic maps derived from minimal Riemannian immersions into spheres. This study is motivated by three families of examples: the totally geodesic inclusion of spheres, the Veronese map and the Clifford torus.