Deformations of totally geodesic foliations and minimal surfaces in negatively curved 3-manifolds (Q2232159)

\textit{M. Gromov} [Enseign. Math. (2) 46, No. 3--4, 391--402 (2000; Zbl 1002.53028)] proved an important geodesic rigidity theorem. The theorem implies that the 1-dimensional foliation induced by the geodesic flow on the unit tangent bundle of a closed hyperbolic manifold \(M\) is a topological invariant. The aim of the paper is to extend this theorem replacing geodesics by 2-dimensional minimal surfaces, but only when \(M\) has dimension 3. More precisely, let \(M\) be a closed hyperbolic 3-manifold and let \(g_t\) be a smooth 1-parameter family of negatively curved metrics on \(M\) starting at the hyperbolic metric. The author constructs a foliation of the Grassmann bundle of tangent 2-planes to \(M\), whose leaves are lifts of immersed minimal surfaces in \((M, g_t )\). This foliation exists only in some neighbourhood of the hyperbolic metric and the author shows examples when such a foliation does not exist globally. As an application, the author shows a certain density result for stable properly immersed minimal surfaces in a closed Riemannian 3-manifold, which admits a foliation as above.