Leaf closures of Riemannian foliations: A survey on topological and geometric aspects of Killing foliations

Abstract

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 main objects appearing in this theory, such as pseudogroups, sheaves, holonomy and basic cohomology. We then review Molino’s structural theory for Riemannian foliations and present its transverse counterpart in the theory of complete pseudogroups of isometries, emphasizing the connections between these topics. We also survey some classical results and recent developments in the theory of Killing foliations. Finally, we review some topics in the theory of singular Riemannian foliations, including the recent proof of Molino’s conjecture, and discuss singular Killing foliations.