Soul-preserving submersions (Q1345498)

Given the title, you might imagine that this is a paper about baptism, but you would be wrong. It is actually an investigation of Riemannian submersions \(\pi : M \to N\) where both \(M\) and \(N\) are complete, connected, non-compact Riemannian manifolds of non-negative sectional curvature. According to \textit{J. Cheeger} and \textit{D. Gromoll} [Ann. Math., II. Ser. 96, 413-443 (1972; Zbl 0246.53049)], the manifolds \(M\) and \(N\) have souls. These are certain totally convex submanifolds of \(M\) and \(N\). According to the author, the submersion \(\pi\) is soul preserving, provided \(\pi\) has compact fibers. Moreover, the structure of \(\pi\) is essentially determined by its restriction to the tangent and normal bundles of the soul of \(M\). The author applies this result to classify all the Riemannian fibrations of the Riemannian product \(S^ n \times \mathbb{R}^ k\) which have compact fibers. He also shows that positively curved open manifolds admit no Riemannian fibrations, and that 1-dimensional Riemannian fibrations of open locally symmetric spaces of non-negative curvature are either homogeneous, or have quotients locally isometric to a Riemannian product of a compact space with an Euclidean space.