Variation of the modulus of a foliation (Q1941328)

The paper considers the variation of the p-modulus of a foliation on a Riemannian manifold and is based on a part of the author's Ph.D. thesis. Let (\(M, g\)) be a Riemannian manifold, \(\mathcal{F}\) a smooth \(k\)-dimensional foliation and \(\mu_M\) a Lebesgue measure on \(M\). For \(p > 1\), let \(L^p(M)\) be the space of all \(p\)-integrable functions on \(M\) with respect to \(\mu_M\) with the norm \({\| p \|}_{p} = (\int_{M}|f|^pd\mu_M)^p\) and \(\operatorname{adm}_p(\mathcal{F})\) be the subset of \(L^p(M)\) of all nonnegative functions \(f\) such that \(\int_{L}fd\mu_L \geq 1\) for almost every \(L \in \mathcal{F}\), where \(\mu_L\) is the Lebesgue measure on \(L\). The \(p\)-modulus \(\operatorname{mod}_p(\mathcal{F})\) of \(\mathcal{F}\) is defined as follows: \(\operatorname{mod}_p(\mathcal{F}) := \inf \{ \| p \|_{p} \mid f \in \operatorname{adm}_p (\mathcal{F})\}\) if \(\operatorname{adm}_p (\mathcal{F}) \neq \varnothing\) and \(\operatorname{mod}_p (\mathcal{F}) = \infty\) otherwise. A function \(f_0 \in \operatorname{adm}_p(\mathcal{F})\) which realizes the modulus, i.e. \({\| p \|}_{p} = \operatorname{mod}_p(\mathcal{F})\), is called the extremal function for the \(p\)-modulus of \(\mathcal{F}\). After introduction of the admissible foliations and the critical points, the author shows the formula for the variation of the modulus (Theorem 8) and some results about the extremal functions and the critical points (Theorem 12).