Conformal and semi-conformal biharmonic maps

We show that a conformal mapping between Riemannian manifolds of the same dimension n >= 3 is biharmonic if and only if the gradient of its dilation satisfies a certain second-order elliptic partial differential equation. On an Einstein manifold solutions can be generated from isoparametric functions. We characterise those semi-conformal submersions that are biharmonic in terms of their dilation and the fibre mean curvature vector field.