In this paper, we study stability for harmonic foliations on locally conformal Kähler manifolds with complex leaves. We also discuss instability for harmonic foliations on compact submanifolds immersed in Euclidean spaces and compact homogeneous spaces.
For a singular Riemannian foliation whose leaves are properly embedded, we show in the first part of this article the existence of global tubular neighbourhoods, and we develop a global description of the foliation as stratification by types of leaves. The second part deals with the further restriction to a foliation without horizontal conjugate points, introduced by Lytchak and Thorbergsson, which in the special case of an isometric group action equals the concept of variationally completeness. Therefrom, we deduce a global geometric description -- the focal points of the leaves are exactly t…
In this paper, we establish a number of results about the topology of the leaves of a closed singular Riemannian foliation $(M,\fol)$. If $M$ is simply connected, we prove that the leaves are finitely covered by nilpotent spaces, and characterize the fundamental group of the generic leaves. If $M$ has virtually nilpotent fundamental group, we prove that the leaves have virtually nilpotent fundamental group as well.
We study Riemannian foliations with complex leaves on Kaehler manifolds. The tensor T, the obstruction to the foliation be totally geodesic, is interpreted as a holomorphic section of a certain vector bundle. This enables us to give classification results when the manifold is compact.
Let $M$ be a Riemannian manifold of dimension $n+1$ with smooth boundary and $p\in \partial M$. We prove that there exists a smooth foliation around $p$ whose leaves are submanifolds of dimension $n$, constant mean curvature and its arrive perpendicular to the boundary of M, provided that $p$ is a nondegenerate critical point of the mean curvature function of $\partial M$.
R. Zimmer proved that, on a compact manifold, a foliation with a dense leaf, a suitable leafwise Riemannian symmetric metric and a transverse Lie structure has arithmetic holonomy group. In this work we improve such result for totally geodesic foliations by showing that the manifold itself is arithmetic. This also gives a positive answer, for some special cases, to a conjecture of E. Ghys.
Motivated by Gray's work on tube formulae for complex submanifolds of complex projective space equipped with the Fubini-Study metric, Riemannian foliations of projective space are studied. We prove that there are no complex Riemannian foliations of any open subset of $\mathbb{P}^n$ of codimension one. As a consequence there is no Riemannian foliation of the projective plane by Riemann surfaces, even locally. We determine how a complex submanifold may arise as an exceptional leaf of a non-trivial singular Riemannian foliation of maximal dimension. Gray's tube formula is applied to obtain a volu…
We prove that every closed, smooth $n$-manifold $X$ admits a Riemannian metric together with a smooth, transversely oriented CMC foliation if and only if its Euler characteristic is zero, where by CMC foliation we mean a codimension-one, transversely oriented foliation with leaves of constant mean curvature and where the value of the constant mean curvature can vary from leaf to leaf. Furthermore, we prove that this CMC foliation of $X$ can be chosen so that the constant values of the mean curvatures of its leaves change sign. We also prove a general structure theorem for any such non-minimal …
A smooth foliation of a Riemannian manifold is metric when its leaves are locally equidistant and is homogenous when its leaves are locally orbits of a Lie group acting by isometries. Homogenous foliations are metric foliations, but metric foliations need not be homogenous foliations. We prove that a homogenous three-sphere is naturally reductive if and only if all of its metric foliations are homogenous.
In this work, we study the geometric properties of spacelike foliations by hypersurfaces on a Lorentz manifold. We investigate conditions for the leaves being stable, totally geodesic or totally umbilical. We consider that $\overline{M}^{n+1}$ is equipped with a timelike closed conformal vector field $ξ$. If the foliation has constant mean curvature, we show that the leaves are stable. When the leaves are compact spacelike hypersurfaces we show that, under certain conditions, its are totally umbilic hypersurfaces. In the case of foliations by complete noncompact hypersurfaces, we using a Maxim…
A foliation on a manifold M can be informally thought of as a partition of M into injectively immersed submanifolds, called leaves. In this thesis we study foliations whose leaves carry some specific geometric structures. The thesis consists of two parts. In the first part we classify foliations on open manifolds whose leaves are either locally conformal symplectic or contact manifolds. These foliations can be described by some higher geometric structures - namely the Poisson and the Jacobi structures. In the second part of the thesis, we consider foliations on open contact manifolds whose lea…
Generalizing results of Chou and Wang \cite{1} we study the flows of the leaves $(M_Θ)_{Θ>0}$ of a foliation of $\mathbb{R}^{n+1}\setminus \{0\}$ consisting of uniformly convex hypersurfaces in the direction of their outer normals with speeds $-\log(F/f)$. For quite general functions $F$ of the principal curvatures of the flow hypersurfaces and $f$ a smooth and positive function on $S^n$ (considered as a function of the normal) we show that there is a distinct leaf $M_{Θ_{*}}$ in this foliation with the property that the flow starting from $M_{Θ_{*}}$ converges to a translating solution of the…
A contact pair on a manifold always admits an associated metric for which the two characteristic contact foliations are orthogonal. We show that all these metrics have the same volume element. We also prove that the leaves of the characteristic foliations are minimal with respect to these metrics. We give an example where these leaves are not totally geodesic submanifolds.
We determine the structure of the fundamental group of the regular leaves of a closed singular Riemannian foliation on a compact, simply connected Riemannian manifold. We also study closed singular Riemannian foliations whose leaves are homeomorphic to aspherical or to Bieberbach manifolds. These foliations, which we call A-foliations and B-foliations, respectively, generalize isometric torus actions on Riemannian manifolds. We apply our results to the classification problem of compact, simply connected Riemannian 4- and 5-manifolds with positive or nonnegative sectional curvature.
We show that the Gromov-Hausdorff limit of a sequence of leaves in a compact foliation is a covering space of the limiting leaf which is no larger than this leaf's holonomy cover. We also show that convergence to such a limit is smooth instead of merely Gromov-Hausdorff. Corollaries include Reeb's local stability theorem, part of Epstein's local structure theorem for foliations by compact leaves, and a continuity theorem of Alvarez and Candel. Several examples are discussed.
In this paper, we study a notion of hyperbolicity for hyperbolicity foliations with 1-dimensional parabolic leaves, namely the non-existence of holomorphic cylinders along the foliation - holomorphic maps from $\D^{n-1} \times \C$ to the manifold sending each $\{*\} \times \C$ to a leaf. We construct a tensor, that is a leaf-wise holomorphic section of a bundle above the foliated manifold, which vanishes on an open saturated set if and only if there exists such a cylinder through each point of this open set. Thanks to this study, we prove that open sets saturated by compact leaves are union of…
Given a (possibly singular) Riemannian foliation $\mathcal{F}$ with closed leaves on a compact manifold $M$ with an adapted metric, we investigate the wave trace invariants for the basic Laplacian about a non-zero period. We compare them to the wave invariants of the underlying Riemannian orbifold that exists when the leaves in the regular region are identified to points, equipped with the metric that is transverse to the leaves of the foliation. Recalling that the basic Laplacian differs from the underlying orbifold Laplacian by a term that is the mean curvature vector field associated to the…
We construct smooth fiber bundles such that the fibers are exotic tori and the total space has finite abelian fundamental group. This gives examples of a Riemannian foliation on a closed manifold whose leaves are exotic tori and whose total space has finite abelian fundamental group.
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 explicitly compute the diffeomorphism group of several types of linear foliations (with dense leaves) on the torus $T^n$, $n\geq 2$, namely codimension one foliations, flows, and the so-called non-quadratic foliations. We show in particular that non-quadratic foliations are rigid, in the sense that they do not admit transverse diffeomorphisms other than $\pm \id$ and translations. The computation is an application of a general formula that we prove for the diffeomorphism group of any Lie foliation with dense leaves on a compact manifold. Our results generalize those of P. Donato and P. Igle…
Let $(G,g)$ be a 4-dimensional Riemannian Lie group with a 2-dimensional left-invariant, conformal foliation $\F$ with minimal leaves. Let $J$ be an almost Hermitian structure on $G$ adapted to the foliation $\F$. We classify such structures $J$ which are almost Kähler $(\A\K)$, integrable $(\I)$ or Kähler $(\K)$. Hereby we construct several new multi-dimensional examples in each class.
In this paper we give a complete local parametric classification of the hypersurfaces with dimension at least three of a space form that carry a totally geodesic foliation of codimension one. A classification under the assumption that the leaves of the foliation are complete was given in \cite{drt} for Euclidean hypersurfaces. We prove that there exists exactly one further class of local examples in Euclidean space, all of which have rank two. We also extend the classification under the global assumption of completeness of the leaves for hypersurfaces of the sphere and show that there exist pl…
We give a complete classification of foliations on open contact manifolds whose leaves are contact submanifolds of the ambient manifold. The results are analogues of Haefliger's classification of foliations on open manifold.
We study foliations of space forms by complete hypersurfaces, under some mild conditions on its higher order mean curvatures. In particular, in Euclidean space we obtain a Bernstein-type theorem for graphs whose mean and scalar curvature do not change sign but may otherwise be nonconstant. We also establish the nonexistence of foliations of the standard sphere whose leaves are complete and have constant scalar curvature, thus extending a theorem of Barbosa, Kenmotsu and Oshikiri. For the more general case of {\em r-}minimal foliations of the Euclidean space, possibly with a singular set, we ar…
In this note we give a characterization of taut Riemannian foliations using the transverse divergence. This result turns out to be a convenient tool in the case of some standard examples. Furthermore, we show that a classical tautness result of Haefliger can be obtained in our particular setting as a straightforward consequence. In the final part of the paper we obtain a tautness characterization for transversally oriented foliations with dense leaves and investigate the case of a submanifold of lower dimension which is closed and orthogonal to the leaves.
Consider a singular Riemannian foliation (s.r.f for short) on a compact manifold. By successive blow-ups along the strata, we construct a regular Riemannian foliation on another compact Riemannian manifold and a desingularization map that projects leaves of the regular Riemannian foliation into leaves of the s.r.f. This result generalizes a previous result due to Molino for the particular case of a singular Riemannian foliation whose leaves were the closure of leaves of a regular Riemannian foliation. We also prove that, if the leaves of the s.r.f are compact, then, for each small epsilon, the…
The basic cohomology of a Riemannian foliation on a complete manifold with all leaves closed is the cohomology of the leaf space. In this paper we introduce various methods to compute the basic cohomology in the presence of both closed and non-closed leaves in the simply-connected case (or more generally for Killing foliations): We show that the total basic Betti number of the union C of the closed leaves is smaller than or equal to the total basic Betti number of the foliated manifold, and we give sufficient conditions for equality. If there is a basic Morse-Bott function with critical set eq…
We prove Wilking's Conjecture about the completeness of dual leaves for the case of Riemannian foliations on nonnegatively curved symmetric spaces. Moreover, we conclude that such foliations split as a product of trivial foliations and a foliation with a single dual leaf.
A smooth foliation is Riemannian when its leaves are locally equidistant. The closures of the leaves of a Riemannian foliation on a simply connected manifold, or more generally of a Killing foliation, are described by flows of transverse Killing vector fields. This offers significant technical advantages in the study of this class of foliations, which nonetheless includes other important classes, such as those given by the orbits of isometric Lie group actions. Aiming at a broad audience, in this survey we introduce Killing foliations from the very basics, starting with a brief revision of the…
In this article, we investigate the stability of leaves of minimal foliations of arbitrary codimension. We also study relations between Jacobi fields and vector fields which preserves a foliation and we use these results to Killing fields.
The transversal twistor space of a foliation F of an even codimension is the bundle ZF of the complex structures of the fibers of the transversal bundle of F. On ZF, there exists a foliation F' by covering spaces of the leaves of F, and any Bott connection of F produces an ordered pair (I,J) of transversal almost complex structures of F'. The existence of a Bott connection which yields a structure I that is projectable to the space of leaves is equivalent to the fact that F is a transversally projective foliation. A Bott connection which yields a projectable structure J exists iff F is a trans…
We show that a compact manifold admitting a Killing foliation with positive transverse curvature fibers over finite quotients of spheres or weighted complex projective spaces, provided that the singular foliation defined by the closures of the leaves has maximal dimension. This result is obtained by deforming the foliation into a closed one while maintaining transverse geometric properties, which allows us to apply results from the Riemannian geometry of orbifolds to the space of leaves. We also show that the basic Euler characteristic is preserved by such deformations. Using this fact we prov…
An important result for regular foliations is their formal semi-local triviality near simply connected leaves. We extend this result to singular foliations for all 2-connected leaves and a wide class of 1- connected leaves by proving a semi-local Levi-Malcev theorem for the semi-simple part of their holonomy Lie algebroid.
In this note we study a new cohomology attached to a function along the leaves of complex foliations. We also explain how this cohomology depends on the function and we study a relative cohomology and a Mayer-Vietoris sequence related to this cohomology.
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…
Consider a parallel plane foliation on real finite-dimensional linear vector space. It induces a foliation on the torus obtained by factorization of the space by the integer lattice (let us denote the latter foliation by F). Let g be arbitrary metric on the torus. It induces a complex structure on each leaf of F such that all the leaves are parabolic: each individual leaf admits a conformal flat complete metric. We show that for any foliation F as above and arbitrary smooth metric g the correspondent complete conformal flat metric on the leaves, which is smooth on individual leaf, can be chose…
A necessary and sufficient condition for the leaves of a {\em non-degenerate} foliation of a pseudo-Riemannian manifold to be conformally flat is developed. The condition mimics the classical condition of the vanishing of the Weyl or Cotton tensor establishing the conformal flatness of a pseudo-Riemannian manifold in the sense that it is also formulated in terms of the vanishing of certain tensors. These tensors play the role of the Weyl or the Cotton tensors and they are defined in terms of the the curvature of a linear torsion-free connection (the {\em bi-conformal connection}).
In this paper, we study submanifolds with constant $r$th mean curvature $S_r$. We investigate, the stability of such submanifolds in the case when they are leaves of a codimension one foliation. We also generalize recent results by Barros - Sousa and Alías - Colares, concerning conformal fields, to an arbitrary manifold. Using this we show that normal component of a Killing field is a $r$th Jacobi field of a submanifold with $S_{r+1}$ constant. Finally, we study relations between $r$th Jacobi fields and vector fields preserving a foliation.
A singular riemannian foliation on a complete riemannian manifold is said to be riemannian if each geodesic that is perpendicular at one point to a leaf remains perpendicular to every leaf it meets. The singular foliation is said to admit sections if each regular point is contained in a totally geodesic complete immersed submanifold that meets every leaf orthogonally and whose dimension is the codimension of the regular leaves. A typical example of such singular foliation is the partition by orbits of a polar action,e.g. the orbits of the adjoint action of a compact Lie group on itself. We pro…
Let (M,F) be a foliated manifold. We study the relationship between the basic cohomology Hb(M,F) of the foliation and the De Rham cohomology H(DF) of the space of leaves M/F as a quotient diffeological space. We prove that for an arbitrary foliation there is a morphism from H(DF) to Hb(M,F). It is an isomorphism when F is a Q-foliation.
We prove a family of new Weitzenböck formulas on a Riemannian foliation with totally geodesic leaves. These Weitzenböck formulas are naturally parametrized by the canonical variation of the metric. As a consequence, under natural geometric conditions, the horizontal Laplacian satisfies a generalized curvature dimension inequality. Among other things, this curvature dimension inequality implies Li-Yau estimates for positive solutions of the horizontal heat equation and a sub-Riemannian Bonnet-Myers compactness theorem whose assumptions only rely on the intrinsic geometry of the horizontal distr…
Let $(G,g)$ be a 4-dimensional Riemannian Lie group with a 2-dimensional left-invariant, conformal foliation $\mathcal{F}$ with minimal leaves. Let $J$ be an almost Hermitian structure on $G$ adapted to the foliation $\mathcal{F}$. The corresponding Lie algebra $\mathfrak{g}$ must then belong to one of 20 families $\mathfrak{g}_1,\dots,\mathfrak{g}_{20}$ according to S. Gudmundsson and M. Svensson. We classify such structures $J$ which are almost Kähler $(\mathcal{A}\mathcal{K})$, integrable $(\mathcal{I})$ or Kähler $(\mathcal{K})$. Hereby, we construct 16 multi-dimensional almost Kähler fami…
A singular Riemannian foliation $F$ on a complete Riemannian manifold $M$ is called a polar foliation if, for each regular point $p$, there is an immersed submanifold $Σ$, called section, that passes through $p$ and that meets all the leaves and always perpendicularly. A typical example of a polar foliation is the partition of $M$ into the orbits of a polar action, i.e., an isometric action with sections. In this work we prove that the leaves of $F$ coincide with the level sets of a smooth map $H: M\to Σ$ if $M$ is simply connected. In particular, we have that the orbits of a polar action on a…
Let Y be a hypersurface in a 2n-dimensional holomorphic symplectic manifold X. The restriction $σ|_Y$ of the holomorphic symplectic form induces a rank one foliation on Y. We investigate situations where this foliation has compact leaves; in such cases we obtain a space of leaves Y/F which has dimension 2n-2 and admits a holomorphic symplectic form.
We describe all families of star-shaped n-polygons in the Euclidean plane with prescribed perimeter and area ; they are leaves of a foliation F on the space of star-shaped n-polygons. By the way, we study some geometric properties of convex polygons, for instance their inscriptibility in a circle and their regularity in relation with the perimeter and the area.
A singular foliation is a partition of a manifold into leaves of perhaps varying dimension. Stefan and Sussmann carried out fundamental work on singular foliations in the 1970s. We survey their contributions, show how diffeological objects and ideas arise naturally in this setting, and highlight some consequences within diffeology. We then introduce a definition of transverse equivalence of singular foliations, following Molino's definition for regular foliations. We show that, whereas transverse equivalent singular foliations always have diffeologically diffeomorphic leaf spaces, the converse…
For transversely homogeneous foliations on compact manifolds whose global holonomy group has connected closure, it is shown that either all holonomy covers of the leaves have polynomial growth with degree bounded by a common constant, or all holonomy covers of the leaves have exponential growth. This is an extension of a recent answer given by Breuillard and Gelander to a question of Carrière. Examples of transversely projective foliations satisfying the above condition were constructed by Chihi and ben Ramdane.
In this paper we study singular riemannian foliations that have sections,i.e., totally geodesic complete immersed submanifolds that meet each leaf orthogonally and whose dimensions are the codimensions of the regular leaves. We prove here that the restriction of the foliation to a slice of a leaf is diffeomorphic to an isoparametric foliation on an open set of an euclidian space. This result gives us local information about the singular foliation and in particular about the singular stratification of the foliation. It also allows us to describe the plaques of the foliation as level sets of a t…
A singular foliation $\mathcal F$ gives a partition of a manifold $M$ into leaves whose dimension may vary. Associated to a singular foliation are two complexes, that of the diffeological differential forms on the leaf space $M / \mathcal F$, and that of the basic differential forms on $M$. We prove the pullback by the quotient map provides an isomorphism of these complexes in the following cases: when $\mathcal F$ is a regular foliation, when points in the leaves of the same dimension assemble into an embedded (more generally, diffeological) submanifold of $M$, and, as a special case of the l…
We define on any affine invariant orbifold M a foliation FM that generalises the isoperiodic foliation on strata of the moduli space of translation surfaces and study the dynamics of its leaves in the rank 1 case. We establish a criterion that ensures the density of the leaves and provide two applications of this criterion. The first one is a classification of the dynamical behavior of the leaves of FM when M is Prym eigenform locus in genus 3 and the second provides the first examples of dense isoperiodic leaves in the stratum H(2, 1, 1).