Singular Riemannian foliations on simply connected spaces

Abstract

A singular 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 a 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 prove that a singular Riemannian foliation with compact leaves that admits sections on a simply connected space has no exceptional leaves, i.e., each regular leaf has trivial normal holonomy. We also prove that there exists a convex fundamental domain in each section of the foliation and in particular that the space of leaves is a convex Coxeter orbifold.