Codimension-one foliations calibrated by nondegenerate closed 2-forms (Q1951188)

The present paper deals with a particular class of codimension-one foliations that are calibrated by nondegenerate \(2\)-forms which is natural from the point of view of symplectic geometry. A codimension-one foliation \(\mathcal{F}\) of a \(2n+1\)-dimensional manifold \(M\) is said to be \(2\)-calibrated if there exists a closed \(2\)-form \(\omega\) such that \(\omega_{|\mathcal{F}}^n\) is nowhere-vanishing. For a \(2\)-calibrated codimension-one foliation \((M,\mathcal{F},\omega)\), the author considers a \(3\)-dimensional Donaldson-type submanifold \(W\hookrightarrow(M,\mathcal{F},\omega)\) [\textit{S. K. Donaldson}, J. Differ. Geom. 44, No. 4, 666--705 (1996; Zbl 0883.53032)] and is mainly interested in finding out which properties of \((M,\mathcal{F},\omega)\) are captured by \(W\). The main results of this paper assert that there exist \(3\)-dimensional Donaldson-type submanifolds \(W\hookrightarrow(M,\mathcal{F},\omega)\), such that for every leaf \(F\) of \(\mathcal{F}\) the intersection \(W\cap F\) is connected. In particular it is deduced that the leaf spaces of \((M,\mathcal{F},\omega)\) are homeomorphic to leaf spaces of \(3\)-dimensional taut foliations. Another topic of this paper concerns the introduction of two surgery constructions for \(2\)-calibrated foliations: normal connected sum and generalized Dehn surgery of Lagrangian surgery. Using surgery the author also proves that there exist \(2\)-calibrated foliations (of dimension bigger than three) which are neither products, nor cosymplectic foliations, nor symplectic bundle foliations.