This paper introduces a new type of open book decomposition for a contact three-manifold with a specified characteristic foliation $\mathcal{F}_ξ$ on its boundary. These \textit{foliated open books} offer a finer tool for studying contact manifolds with convex boundary than existing models, as the boundary foliation carries more data than the dividing set. In addition to establishing fundamental results about the uniqueness and existence of foliated open books, we carefully examine their relationship with the partial open books introduced by Honda-Kazez-Matic. Foliated open books have user-friendly cutting and gluing properties, and they arise naturally as submanifolds of classical open books for closed three-manifolds. We define three versions of foliated open books (embedded, Morse, and abstract), and we prove the equivalence of these models as well as a Giroux Correspondence which characterizes the foliated open books associated to a fixed triple $(M, ξ, \mathcal{F})$.
Kotschick and Morita recently discovered factorisations of characteristic classes of transversally symplectic foliations that yield new characteristic classes in foliated cohomology. We describe an alternative construction of such factorisations and construct examples of topologically trivial foliated vector bundles for which these characteristic classes are non-trivial. This shows that the foliated cohomology classes of Kotschick and Morita carry information that is not merely topological.
Morse foliated open books were introduced by the autors (along with abstract and embedded versions) as a tool for studying contact manifolds with boundary, and this article illustrates the advantages of the Morse perspective. We use this to extend the definition of \textit{right-veering} to foliated open books and we show that it plays a similar role in detecting overtwistedness as in other versions of open books.
A foliation of a manifold M is called R-covered if its lift to the universal cover of M has space of leaves R. We show that there are many graph manifolds which admit taut foliations, but which do not admit any R-covered foliations. On the other hand, we show that these manifolds all have finite covers admitting R-covered foliations.
This paper compares two invariants of foliated manifolds which seem to measure the non-Hausdorffness of the leaf space: the transversal length on the fundamental group and the foliated Gromov norm on the homology. We consider foliations with the property that the set of singular simplices transverse to the foliation satisfies a weakened version of the Kan extension property. (We prove that this assumption is fairly general: it holds for all fibration-covered foliations, in particular for all foliations of 3-manifolds without Reeb components.) For such foliations we show that vanishing of the t…
This paper presents two existence h-principles, the first for conformal symplectic structures on closed manifolds, and the second for leafwise conformal symplectic structures on foliated manifolds with non empty boundary. The latter h-principle allows to linearly deform certain codimension-$1$ foliations to contact structures. These results are essentially applications of the Borman-Eliashberg-Murphy h-principle for overtwisted contact structures and of the Eliashberg-Murphy symplectization of cobordisms, together with tools pertaining to foliated Morse theory, which are elaborated here.
We prove that a fundamental group of codimension one nonnegative Ricci curvature C2-foliation of a closed Riemannian manifold is finitely generated and almost abelian, i.e. it contains abelian subgroup of finite index. In particular, we confirm the Milnor conjecture for manifolds which are leaves of codimension one nonnegative Ricci curvature foliation of closed manifold.
We introduce an essential open book foliation, a refinement of the open book foliation, and develop technical estimates of the fractional Dehn twist coefficient (FDTC) of monodromies and the FDTC for closed braids, which we introduce as well. As applications, we quantitatively study the `gap' of overtwisted contact structures and a non-right-veering monodromies. We give sufficient conditions for a 3-manifold to be irreducible and atoroidal. We also show that the geometries of a 3-manifold and the complement of a closed braid are determined by the Nielsen-Thurston types of the monodromies of th…
We introduce the foliated anti-self dual equation for higher dimensional smooth manifolds with codimension-4 Riemannian foliations. Several fundamental results are established, towards the defining of a Donaldson type invariant for such foliations.
We study open book foliations on surfaces in 3-manifolds, and give applications to contact geometry of dimension 3. We prove a braid-theoretic formula of the self-linking number of transverse links, which reveals an unexpected link to the Johnson-Morita homomorphism in mapping class group theory. We also give an alternative combinatorial proof to the Bennequin-Eliashberg inequality.
We introduce a contact invariant in the bordered sutured Heegaard Floer homology of a three-manifold with boundary. The input for the invariant is a contact manifold $(M, ξ, \mathcal{F})$ whose convex boundary is equipped with a signed singular foliation $\mathcal{F}$ closely related to the characteristic foliation. Such a manifold admits a family of foliated open book decompositions classified by a Giroux Correspondence, as described in earlier work of Licata and Vértesi. We use a special class of foliated open books to construct admissible bordered sutured Heegaard diagrams and identify well…
We study b-arc foliation change and exchange move of open book foliations which generalize the corresponding operations in braid foliation theory. We also define a bypass move as an analogue of Honda's bypass attachment operation. As applications, we study how open book foliations change under a stabilization of the open book. We also generalize Birman-Menasco's split/composite braid theorem: Closed braid representatives of a split (resp. composite) link in a certain open book can be converted to a split (resp. composite) closed braid by applying exchange moves finitely many times.
We consider singular foliations of codimension one on 3-manifolds, in the sense defined by A. Haefliger as being Gamma_1-structures. We prove that under the obvious linear embedding condition, they are Gamma_1-homotopic to a regular foliation carried by an open book or a twisted open book. The latter concept is introduced for this aim. Our result holds true in every regularity C^r, r at least 1. In particular, in dimension 3, this gives a very simple proof of Thurston's 1976 regularization theorem without using Mather's homology equivalence.
Some properties of Riemannian foliations on closed manifolds are generalized to compact equicontinuous foliated spaces. For instance, it is proved that all holonomy covers of the leaves are quasi-isometric to each other.
For fibred boundary and fibred cusp metrics, Hausel, Hunsicker, and Mazzeo identified the space of $L^2$ harmonic forms of fixed degree with the images of maps between intersection cohomology groups of an associated stratified space obtained by collapsing the fibres of the fibration at infinity onto its base. In the present paper, we obtain a generalization of this result to situations where, rather than a fibration at infinity, there is a Riemannian foliation with compact leaves admitting a resolution by a fibration. If the associated stratified space (obtained now by collapsing the leaves of…
The idea of Lichnerowicz or Morse-Novikov cohomology groups of a manifold has been utilized by many researchers to study important properties and invariants of a manifold. Morse-Novikov cohomology is defined using the differential $d_ω=d+ω\wedge$, where $ω$ is a closed $1$-form. We study Morse-Novikov cohomology relative to a foliation on a manifold and its homotopy invariance and then extend it to more general type of forms on a Riemannian foliation. We study the Laplacian and Hodge decompositions for the corresponding differential operators on reduced leafwise Morse-Novikov complexes. In the…
Let (M, F) be a compact codimension-one foliated manifold whose leaves are equipped with Riemannian metrics, and consider continuous functions on M that are harmonic along the leaves of F . If every such function is constant on leaves we say that (M, F) has the Liouville property. Our main result is that codimension-one foliated bundles over compact negatively curved manifolds satisfy the Liouville property. Related results for R-covered foliations, as well as for discrete group actions and discrete harmonic functions, are also established.
Let $Δ$ be a foliation on a topological manifold $X$, $Y$ be the space of leaves, and $p: X \to Y$ be the natural projection. Endow $Y$ with the factor topology with respect to $p$. Then the group $\mathcal{H}(X, Δ)$ of foliated (i.e. mapping leaves onto leaves) homeomorphisms of $X$ naturally acts on the space of leaves $Y$, which gives a homomorphism $ψ: \mathcal{H}(X, Δ) \to \mathcal{H}(Y)$. We present sufficient conditions when $ψ$ is continuous with respect to the corresponding compact open topologies. In fact similar results hold not only for foliations but for a more general class of pa…
We prove a cyclic Lefschetz formula for foliations. To this end, we define a notion of equivariant cyclic cohomology and show that its expected pairing with K-theory is well defined. This enables to associate to any invariant transverse current on a compact foliated manifold, a Lefschetz formula for leafwise preserving isometries.
A transitive compact foliated space is shown to be a Riemannian foliation if and only if it is locally connected, finite dimensional, strongly equicontinuous and quasi-analytic, and the closure of its holonomy pseudogroup is quasi-analytic.
Let $X$ be a connected non-compact $2$-dimensional manifold possibly with boundary and $Δ$ be a foliation on $X$ such that each leaf $ω\inΔ$ is homeomorphic to $\mathbb{R}$ and has a trivially foliated neighborhood. Such foliations on the plane were studied by W. Kaplan who also gave their topological classification. He proved that the plane splits into a family of open strips foliated by parallel lines and glued along some boundary intervals. However W. Kaplan's construction depends on a choice of those intervals, and a foliation is described in a non-unique way. We propose a canonical cuttin…
