Haefliger's codimension-one singular foliations, open books and twisted open books in dimension 3 (Q1930312)

Thurston's existence theorem for foliations on closed manifolds of vanishing Euler characteristic [\textit{W. P. Thurston}, Ann. Math. (2) 104, 249--268 (1976; Zbl 0347.57014)] asserts that every codimension 1 Haefliger structure is homotopic to a foliation. Here a codimension 1 Haefliger structure means a line bundle \(\nu:E(\nu)\rightarrow M\) and a foliation of \(E(\nu)\) transverse to fibers. A Haefliger structure induces a (possibly singular) foliation on \(M\) by intersecting the leaves with \(M\). The paper under review gives a new proof for a special instance of Thurston's existence theorem, namely that every codimension 1 Haefliger structure on a closed 3-manifold \(M\) is homotopic to a foliation. While Thurston's proof used round handle decompositions, the new proof is using open book decompositions and the well-known fact that every open book \(\mathcal{B}\) gives rise to a canonical foliation \({\mathcal{F}}_{\mathcal{B}}\). The new proof has the advantage that it does not make use of Mather's computation of the homology of the classifying space of Haefliger structures. The idea is to associate a (possibly twisted) open book decomposition \(\mathcal{B}\) to a Haefliger structure and then to homotope the Haefliger structure into the canonical foliation \({\mathcal{F}}_{\mathcal{B}}\). The proof proceeds by the following steps. The given Haefliger structure is homotoped such that the singularities of the induced foliation are Morse singularities and have a pseudo-gradient with trivial dynamics. One deduces a decomposition \(M=N(\Sigma)\cup H\), where \(N(\Sigma)\) is a neighborhood of a surface transverse to \(X\) and \(H\) consists of one or two handlebodies. This is used to build an open book decomposition \(\mathcal{B}\) such that \(\Sigma\) minus a disk is contained in a page and \(\nu\) is isomorphic to the normal bundle of \({\mathcal{F}}_{\mathcal{B}}\). Then the Haefliger structure is further homotoped such that it becomes trivial in \(H\) but remains transverse to \(X\) in \(N(\Sigma)\), and in the final step it is homotoped into \({\mathcal{F}}_{\mathcal{B}}\).