Integral Formulas for Almost Product Manifolds and Foliations

Abstract

Integral formulas are powerful tools used to obtain global results in geometry and analysis. The integral formulas for almost multi-product manifolds, foliations and multiply twisted products of Riemannian, metric-affine and sub-Riemannian manifolds, to which this review paper is devoted, are useful for studying such problems as (i) the existence and characterization of foliations with a given geometric property, such as being totally geodesic, minimal or totally umbilical; (ii) prescribing the generalized mean curvatures of the leaves of a foliation; (iii) minimizing volume-like functionals defined for tensors on foliated manifolds. We start from the series of integral formulas for codimension one foliations of Riemannian and metric-affine manifolds, and then we consider integral formulas for regular and singular foliations of arbitrary codimension. In the second part of the article, we represent integral formulas with the mixed scalar curvature of an almost multi-product structure on Riemannian and metric-affine manifolds, give applications to hypersurfaces of space forms with k=2,3 distinct principal curvatures of constant multiplicities and then discuss integral formulas for foliations or distributions on sub-Riemannian manifolds.

Keywords

• distribution
• foliation
• mixed scalar curvature
• almost product structure