A New Approximation of Relaxed Energies for Harmonic Maps and the Faddeev Model

We propose a newapproximation for the relaxed energy E of the Dirichlet energy and prove that the minimizers of the approximating functionals converge to a minimizer u of the relaxed energy, and that u is partially regular without using the concept of Cartesian currents.We also use the same approximation method to study the variational problem of the relaxed energy for the Faddeev model and prove the existence of minimizers for the relaxed energy ˜E_F in the class of maps with Hopf degree ±1.