Singular foliations through diffeology

Abstract

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 holds only for certain classes of singular foliations. We finish by showing that the basic cohomology of a singular foliation is invariant under transverse equivalence.