This is a problem list in the theory of foliations and laminations of 3-manifolds. The focus is on the relationship of foliations and laminations with other aspects of 3-manifold topology, especially with the Thurston theory of geometric structures. This problem list is not meant to be comprehensive; rather it focusses on research areas that currently seem (to the author) particularly promising.
We show that every co--orientable taut foliation F of an orientable, atoroidal 3-manifold admits a transverse essential lamination. If this transverse lamination is a foliation G, the pair F,G are the unstable and stable foliation respectively of an Anosov flow. Otherwise, F admits a pair of transverse very full genuine laminations. In the second case, M satisfies the weak geometrization conjecture - either its fundamental group contains Z+Z or it is word-hyperbolic. Moreover, if M is atoroidal, the mapping class group of M is finite, and any automorphism homotopic to the identity is isotopic …
We show that for a taut foliation F with one-sided branching of an atoroidal 3-manifold M, one can construct a pair of genuine laminations with solid torus complementary regions which bind every leaf of F in a geodesic lamination. These laminations come from a universal circle, a refinement of the universal circles proposed by Thurston, which maps monotonely and group-equivariantly to each of the circles at infinity of the leaves of the universal cover of F, and is minimal with respect to this property. This circle is intimately bound up with the extrinsic geometry of the leaves of F. In parti…
We extend the unpublished work of M. Handel and R. Miller on the classification, up to isotopy, of endperiodic automorphisms of surfaces. We give the Handel-Miller construction of the geodesic laminations, give an axiomatic theory for pseudo-geodesic lamaniations, show the geodesic laminations satisfy the axioms, and prove that paeudo-geodesic laminations satisfying our axioms are ambiently isotopic to the geodesic laminations. The axiomatic approach allows us to show that the given endperiodic automorphism is isotopic to a smooth endperiodic automorphism preserving smooth laminations ambientl…
If M is an atoroidal 3-manifold with a taut foliation, Thurston showed that pi_1(M) acts on a circle. Here, we show that some other classes of essential laminations also give rise to actions on circles. In particular, we show this for tight essential laminations with solid torus guts. We also show that pseudo-Anosov flows induce actions on circles. In all cases, these actions can be made into faithful ones, so pi_1(M) is isomorphic to a subgroup of Homeo(S^1). In addition, we show that the fundamental group of the Weeks manifold has no faithful action on S^1. As a corollary, the Weeks manifold…
Measured foliations at infinity of quasi-Fuchsian manifolds are a natural analog at infinity to the measured bending laminations on the boundary of its convex core. We show that given a pair of arational measured foliations $(\mathsf{F}_{+},\mathsf{F}_{-})$ which fill a closed hyperbolic surface $S$, for $t>0$ sufficiently small, $t\mathsf{F}_{+}$ and $t\mathsf{F}_{-}$ can be uniquely realised as the measured foliations at infinity of a quasi-Fuchsian manifold homeomorphic to $S\times \mathbb{R}$, which is sufficiently close to the Fuchsian locus. Here arationality means that the corresponding…
We show that every topological surface lamination of a 3-manifold M is isotopic to one with smoothly immersed leaves. This carries out a project proposed by Gabai in [Problems in foliations and laminations, AMS/IP Stud. Adv. Math. 2.2 1--33]. Consequently any such lamination admits the structure of a Riemann surface lamination, and therefore useful structure theorems of Candel [Uniformization of surface laminations, Ann. Sci. Ecole Norm. Sup. 26 (1993) 489--516] and Ghys [Dynamique et geometrie complexes, Panoramas et Syntheses 8 (1999)] apply.
We introduce and define "oriented framed measured lamination links" in a 3-manifold $M$. These generalize oriented framed links in 3-manifolds, and are confined to 2-dimensional improperly embedded subsurfaces of the 3-manifold. Just as some framed links bound Seifert surfaces, so also some framed lamination links bound 2-dimensional measured and oriented "Seifert laminations." We show that any lamination link which bounds a 2-dimensional Seifert lamination, bounds a "taut" Seifert lamination, i.e. one of maximum Euler characteristic, subject to the condition that the Seifert lamination is car…
We use sutured manifold theory, essential laminations and essential branched surfaces to establish the upper bounds of distances between certain types of nonsimple Dehn surgery slopes. This is the revised version of an earlier preprint {\it Dehn surgery and simple manifolds.}
We show that if a closed atoroidal 3-manifold M contains a genuine lamination, then it is group negatively curved in the sense of Gromov. Specifically, we exploit the structure of the non-product complementary regions of the genuine lamination and then apply the first author's Ubiquity Theorem to show that M satisfies a linear isoperimetric inequality.
A famous example of Casson and Gordon shows that a Haken 3-manifold can have an infinite family of irreducible Heegaard splittings with different genera. In this paper, we prove that a closed non-Haken 3-manifold has only finitely many irreducible Heegaard splittings, up to isotopy. This is much stronger than the Waldhausen conjecture. Another immediate corollary is that for any irreducible non-Haken 3-manifold M, there is a number N, such that any two Heegaard splittings of M are equivalent after at most N stabilizations.
We show that if $\mathcal{L}$ is a codimension-one lamination in a finite volume hyperbolic 3-manifold such that the principal curvatures of each leaf of $\mathcal{L}$ are all in the interval $(-δ,δ)$ for a fixed $δ\in[0,1)$ and no complimentary region of $\mathcal{L}$ is an interval bundle over a surface, then each boundary leaf of $\mathcal{L}$ has a nontrivial fundamental group. We also prove existence of a fixed constant $δ_0 > 0$ such that if $\mathcal{L}$ is a codimension-one lamination in a finite volume hyperbolic 3-manifold such that the principal curvatures of each leaf of $\mathcal{…
We study R-covered foliations of 3-manifolds from the point of view of their transverse geometry. For an R-covered foliation in an atoroidal 3-manifold M, we show that M-tilde can be partially compactified by a canonical cylinder S^1_univ x R on which pi_1(M) acts by elements of Homeo(S^1) x Homeo(R), where the S^1 factor is canonically identified with the circle at infinity of each leaf of F-tilde. We construct a pair of very full genuine laminations transverse to each other and to F, which bind every leaf of F. This pair of laminations can be blown down to give a transverse regulating pseudo…
We give a sufficient condition for a branched surface in a 3 dimensional manifold to fully carry a lamination, giving a piece of answer to a classical question of D. Gabai.
We analyse the existence question for essential laminations in 3-manifolds. The purpose is to prove that there are infinitely many closed hyperbolic 3-manifolds which do not admit essential laminations. This answers in the negative a question posed by Gabai and Oertel. The proof is obtained by analysing certain group actions on trees and showing that certain 3-manifold groups only have trivial actions on trees. In general the trees are neither simplicial nor metric. There are corollaries concerning the existence question for Reebless foliations and pseudo-Anosov flows.
Given a n-dimensional lamination endowed with a Riemannian metric, we introduce the notion of a multiplicative cocycle of rank d, where n and d are arbitrary positive integers. The holonomy cocycle of a foliation and its exterior powers as well as its tensor powers provide examples of multiplicative cocycles. Next, we define the Lyapunov exponents of such a cocycle with respect to a harmonic probability measure directed by the lamination. We also prove an Oseledec multiplicative ergodic theorem in this context. This theorem implies the existence of an Oseledec decomposition almost everywhere w…
We define a laminar branched surface to be a branched surface satisfying the following conditions: (1) Its horizontal boundary is incompressible; (2) there is no monogon; (3) there is no Reeb component; (4) there is no sink disk (after eliminating trivial bubbles in the branched surface). The first three conditions are standard in the theory of branched surfaces, and a sink disk is a disk branch of the branched surface with all branch directions of its boundary arcs pointing inwards. We will show in this paper that every laminar branched surface carries an essential lamination, and any essenti…
The aim of the paper is to investigate the relation between inverse limit of branched manifolds and codimension zero laminations. We give necessary and sufficient conditions for such an inverse limit to be a lamination. We also show that codimension zero laminations are inverse limits of branched manifolds. The inverse limit structure allows us to show that equicontinuous codimension zero laminations preserves a distance function on transversals.
Whether every hyperbolic 3-manifold admits a tight contact structure or not is an open question. Many hyperbolic 3-manifolds contain taut foliations and taut foliations can be perturbed to tight contact structures. The first examples of hyperbolic 3-manifolds without taut foliations were constructed by Roberts, Shareshian, and Stein, and infinitely many of them do not even admit essential laminations as shown by Fenley. In this paper, we construct tight contact structures on a family of 3-manifolds including these examples. These contact structures are described by contact surgery diagrams and…
We give a general lower bound for the normal Gromov norm of genuine laminations in terms of the topology of the complementary regions. In the special case of 3-manifolds, this yields a generalization of Agol's inequality from incompressible surfaces to tight laminations. In particular, the inequality excludes the existence of tight laminations with nonempty guts on 3-manifolds of small simplicial volume.
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.
We show that a graph manifold which is a Z-homology 3-sphere not homeomorphic to either the 3-sphere or the Poincaré homology 3-sphere admits a horizontal foliation. This combines with known results to show that the conditions of not being an L-space, of having a left-orderable fundamental group, and of admitting a co-oriented taut foliation, are equivalent for graph manifold Z-homology 3-spheres.
A graph manifold rational homology $3$-sphere $W$ with a left-orderable fundamental group admits a co-oriented taut foliation, though it is unknown whether it admits a smooth co-oriented taut foliation. In this paper we extend the gluing theorem of arXiv:1401.7726 to graph manifold rational homology solid tori and use this to show that there are smooth foliations on the pieces of $W$ which come close to matching up on its JSJ tori. This is applied to prove that a graph manifold with left-orderable fundamental group is not an L-space.
We produce examples of taut foliations of hyperbolic 3-manifolds which are R-covered but not uniform --- ie the leaf space of the universal cover is R, but pairs of leaves are not contained in bounded neighborhoods of each other. This answers in the negative a conjecture of Thurston `Three-manifolds, foliations and circles I' (math.GT/9712268). We further show that these foliations can be chosen to be C^0 close to foliations by closed surfaces. Our construction underscores the importance of the existence of transverse regulating vector fields and cone fields for R-covered foliations. Finally, …
On every compact and orientable three-manifold, we construct total foliations (three codimension 1 foliations that are transverse at every point). This construction can be performed on any homotopy class of plane fields with vanishing Euler class. As a corollary we obtain similar results on bi-contact structures.
We describe several methods to construct minimal foliations by hyperbolic surfaces on closed 3-manifolds, and discuss the properties of the examples thus obtained.
We investigate the combinatorial analogues, in the context of normal surfaces, of taut and transversely measured (codimension 1) foliations of 3-manifolds. We establish that the existence of certain combinatorial structures, a priori weaker than the existence of the corresponding foliation, is sufficient to guarantee that the manifold in question satisfies certain properties, e.g. irreducibility. The finiteness of our combinatorial structures allows us to make our results quantitative in nature and has (coarse) geometrical consequences for the manifold. Furthermore, our techniques give a strai…
Let $N$ be a compact manifold with a foliation $\mathscr{F}_N$ whose leaves are compact strictly convex projective manifolds. Let $M$ be a compact manifold with a foliation $\mathscr{F}_M$ whose leaves are compact hyperbolic manifolds of dimension bigger than or equal to $3$. Suppose to have a foliation-preserving homeomorphism $f:(N,\mathscr{F}_N) \rightarrow (M,\mathscr{F}_M)$ which is $C^1$-regular when restricted to leaves. In the previous situation there exists a well-defined notion of foliated volume entropies $h(N,\mathscr{F}_N)$ and $h(M,\mathscr{F}_M)$ and it holds $h(M,\mathscr{F}_M)…
If $Y$ is a closed orientable graph manifold, we show that $Y$ admits a coorientable taut foliation if and only if $Y$ is not an L-space. Combined with previous work of Boyer and Clay, this implies that $Y$ is an L-space if and only if $π_1(Y)$ is not left-orderable.
Holomorphic realizations of pairs of foliations on Riemann surfaces
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill(北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校);Graduate Center of the City University of New York(纽约市立大学研究生中心);Queens College of the City University of New York(纽约市立大学皇后学院)
Let Gamma_0 be a discrete group. For a pair (j,rho) of representations of Gamma_0 into PO(n,1)=Isom(H^n) with j geometrically finite, we study the set of (j,rho)-equivariant Lipschitz maps from the real hyperbolic space H^n to itself that have minimal Lipschitz constant. Our main result is the existence of a geodesic lamination that is "maximally stretched" by all such maps when the minimal constant is at least 1. As an application, we generalize two-dimensional results and constructions of Thurston and extend his asymmetric metric on Teichmüller space to a geometrically finite setting and to …
For any 3-manifold M and any nonnegative integer g, we give here examples of metrics on M each of which has a sequence of embedded minimal surfaces of genus g and without Morse index bounds. On any spherical space form S^3/Gamma we construct such a metric with positive scalar curvature. More generally we construct such a metric with Scal>0 (and such surfaces) on any 3-manifold which carries a metric with Scal>0. In all but one of these examples the Hausdorff limit will be a singular minimal lamination. The singularities being in each case exactly two points lying on a closed leaf (the leaf is …
We consider the existence of symplectic and conformal symplectic codimension-one foliations on closed manifolds of dimension at least 5. Our main theorem, based on a recent result by Bertelson-Meigniez, states that in dimension at least 7 any almost contact structure is homotopic to a conformal symplectic foliation. In dimension 5 we construct explicit conformal symplectic foliations on every closed, simply-connected, almost contact manifold, as well as honest symplectic foliations on a large subset of them. Lastly, via round-connected sums, we obtain, on closed manifolds, examples of conforma…
In this note we observe, answering a question of Eliashberg and Thurston, that all contact structures on a closed oriented 3-manifold are $C^\infty$-deformations of foliations.
We present a few general results on foliations of 4-manifolds by surfaces: existence, tautness, relations to minimal genus of embedded surfaces; as well as some open problems. We hope to stimulate interest in this area.
Piecewise Euclidean structures (identified solid Euclidean polyhedra) on topological 3-dimensional manifolds and pseudo-manifolds are constructed so that they admit pseudo-foliations, a generalized type of foliation. The construction of non-manifold point neighborhoods is done to preserve as much of the geometric, and vector space, structure of Euclidean space as possible. This enables structures, such as foliations and calibrations, to generalize over to pseudo-manifolds. The main result is that the cone of any compact topological surfaces can be given a piecewise flat metric structure that a…
The boundary at infinity of a quasifuchsian hyperbolic manifold is equiped with a holomorphic quadratic differential. Its horizontal measured foliation $f$ can be interpreted as the natural analog of the measured bending lamination on the boundary of the convex core. This analogy leads to a number of questions. We provide a variation formula for the renormalized volume in terms of the extremal length $\ext(f)$ of $f$, and an upper bound on $\ext(f)$. We then describe two extensions of the holomorphic quadratic differential at infinity, both valid in higher dimensions. One is in terms of Poinca…
In this paper we show that every three-dimensional closed hyperbolic manifold admits no locally geometric $1$-parameter family of closed minimal surfaces.
This paper is devoted to discussing affine Hirsch foliations on $3$-manifolds. First, we prove that up to isotopic leaf-conjugacy, every closed orientable $3$-manifold $M$ admits $0$, $1$ or $2$ affine Hirsch foliations. Furthermore, every case is possible. Then, we analyze the $3$-manifolds admitting two affine Hirsch foliations (abbreviated as Hirsch manifolds). On the one hand, we construct Hirsch manifolds by using exchangeable braided links (abbreviated as DEBL Hirsch manifolds); on the other hand, we show that every Hirsch manifold virtually is a DEBL Hirsch manifold. Finally, we show th…
In this paper, we prove that if a quasi-Fuchsian 3-manifold contains a minimal surface whose principle curvature is less than 1, then it admits a foliation such that each leaf is a surface of constant mean curvature. The key method that we use here is volume preserving mean curvature flow.
We present new open manifolds that are not homeomorphic to leaves of any C^0 codimension one foliation of a compact manifold. Among them are simply connected manifolds of dimension 5 or greater that are non-periodic in homotopy or homology, namely in their 2-dimensional homotopy or homology groups.
We present existence results for certain singular 2-dimensional foliations on 4-manifolds. The singularities can be chosen to be simple, e.g. the same as those that appear in Lefschetz pencils. There seems to be a wealth of such creatures on most 4-manifolds. In certain cases, one can prescribe surfaces to be transverse or be leaves of these foliations. The purpose of this paper is to offer objects, hoping for a future theory to be developed on them. For example, foliations that are taut might offer genus bounds for embedded surfaces (Kronheimer's conjecture).
Every open manifold L of dimension greater than one has complete Riemannian metrics g with bounded geometry such that (L,g) is not quasi-isometric to a leaf of a codimension one foliation of a closed manifold. Hence no conditions on the local geometry of (L,g) suffice to make it quasi-isometric to a leaf of such a foliation. We introduce the `bounded homology property', a semi-local property of (L,g) that is necessary for it to be a leaf in a compact manifold in codimension one, up to quasi-isometry. An essential step involves a partial generalization of the Novikov closed leaf theorem to high…
We define Seiberg-Witten equations on closed manifolds endowed with a Riemannian foliation of codimension 4. When the foliation is taut, we show compactness of the moduli space under some hypothesis satisfied for instance by closed K-contact manifolds. Furthermore, we prove some vanishing and non-vanishing results and we highlight that the invariants may be used to distinguish different foliations on diffeomorphic manifolds.
We prove the following theorem for Holomorphic Foliations in compact complex kaehler manifolds: if there is a compact leaf with finite holonomy, then every leaf is compact with finite holonomy. As corollary we reobtain stability theorems for compact foliations in Kaehler manifolds of Edwards-Millett-Sullivan and Hollman.
This paper investigates certain foliations of three-manifolds that are hybrids of fibrations over the circle with foliated circle bundles over surfaces: a 3-manifold slithers around the circle when its universal cover fibers over the circle so that deck transformations are bundle automorphisms. Examples include hyperbolic 3-manifolds of every possible homological type. We show that all such foliations admit transverse pseudo-Anosov flows, and that in the universal cover of the hyperbolic cases, the leaves limit to sphere-filling Peano curves. The skew R-covered Anosov foliations of Sergio Fenl…
We investigate contrasting behaviours emerging when studying foliations on non-metrisable manifolds. It is shown that Kneser's pathology of a manifold foliated by a single leaf cannot occur with foliations of dimension-one. On the other hand, there are open surfaces admitting no foliations. This is derived from a qualitative study of foliations defined on the long tube $\mathbb S^1\times {\mathbb L}_+$ (product of the circle with the long ray), which is reminiscent of a `black hole', in as much as the leaves of such a foliation are strongly inclined to fall into the hole in a purely vertical w…
For a compact complex manifold, we introduce holomorphic foliations associated with certain abelian subgroups of the automorphism group. Such foliations are generalizations of holomorphic principal torus bundles. If there exists a transverse Kähler structure on such a foliation, then we obtain a nice differential graded algebra which is quasi-isomorphic to the de Rham complex and a nice differential bigraded algebra which is quasi-isomorphic to the Dolbeault complex like the formality of compact Kähler manifolds. Moreover, under certain additional condition, we can develop Morgan's theory of m…