Morphisms between complete Riemannian pseudogroups (Q2474465)

In this long, detailed and well-written paper the authors study mappings between Riemannian foliations and morphisms between Riemannian pseudogroups. To use the language of categories the authors generalize some classical notions of the theory. They introduce the notion of a morphism of pseudogroups which is more general than the étalé morphism defined by \textit{A. Haefliger} in [in: A fête of topology, Pap. Dedic. Itiro Tamura, 3--32 (1988; Zbl 0667.57012)]. Elements of a morphism are required to be only continuous maps, not homeomorphisms of open subsets. This slight generalization permits to define a functor from the category of foliated spaces and their continuous foliated mappings into the category of pseudogroups and their morphisms, the holonomy functor. The authors' interest concentrates on mappings between Riemannian foliations and on Riemannian pseudogroups, i.e. pseudogroups whose elements are isometries of some Riemannian metric, and their morphisms. The main result of the paper is Theorem A which says that any morphism between complete Riemannian pseudogroups is complete, has a closure and is of class \(C^{0,\infty},\) i.e. of class \(C^{\infty}\) along the orbits. The theorem is a generalization of a well-known result on Lie groups saying that a continuous homomorphism of Lie groups is of class \(C^{0,\infty}.\) To supplement the theorem there are examples of non-complete morphisms between complete pseudogroups showing that the ``Riemannian'' assumption is essential. To study in depth the problems of homotopy of foliated mappings of Riemannian foliations the authors introduce a so-called ``strong adapted topology,'' which is the same as the compact open topology if the leaf closures are compact. For this topology they prove a series of results on denseness, approximation and homotopy of \(C^{0,\infty}\)-foliated maps. As a corollary they obtain the following result: Any foliated homotopy equivalence between transversely complete Riemannian foliations induces an isomorphism of \(E_i\), \(i \geq 2, \) of the associated spectral sequence, which, in particular, generalizes the result of \textit{A. El Kacimi Alaoui} and \textit{M. Nicolau} on the topological invariance of basic cohomology of Riemannian foliations on closed manifolds, [Math. Ann. 295, No.~4, 627--634 (1993; Zbl 0793.57016)]. Finally, they introduce a similar topology in the space of morphisms between Riemannian pseudogroups and prove similar properties of these morphisms. It is a long paper divided into 31 sections. The first 15 sections are introductory. The main result is proved in Sections 16 and 17. Sections 28--23 are dedicated to foliated maps. The invariance of the spectral sequence is proved in Section 25, and Sections 26--29 are about morphisms of pseudogroups. Examples are presented in Section 30. The paper is supplemented by a section (31) devoted to open problems.