Global regularity of wave maps I. Small critical Sobolev norm in high dimension

We show that wave maps from Minkowski space $R^{1+n}$ to a sphere are globally smooth if the initial data is smooth and has small norm in the critical Sobolev space $\dot H^{n/2}$ in the high dimensional case $n \geq 5$. A major difficulty, not present in the earlier results, is that the $\dot H^{n/2}$ norm barely fails to control $L^\infty$, potentially causing a logarithmic divergence in the nonlinearity; however, this can be overcome by using co-ordinate frames adapted to the wave map by approximate parallel transport. In the sequel of this paper we address the more interesting two-dimensional case, which is energy-critical.