Residues of the Bott class and an application to the Futaki invariant (Q2565956)

A real foliation on a compact manifold admits a classical cohomological invariant: the Godbillon-Vey class. The paper under review studies its complex counterpart: the Bott class of transversely holomorphic foliations on a compact real smooth manifold. This is a class of \(2q+1\)- cohomology of the ambient manifold with coefficients in \(\mathbb C\slash\mathbb Z\). In the case, when the canonical line bundle of the foliation is topologically trivial, the classical definition (analogous to that of the Godbillon-Vey class) represents the Bott class by a closed \(2q+1\)- form. In the general case it is known that the imaginary part of the Bott class can be represented by an explicitly written closed form, while studying the real part is rather technical. The paper under review provides an explicit representative for the Bott class by using a version of Čech-de Rham complex. This representative can be treated as a differential form. One takes a good covering of the manifold by open domains. The previous representative of the Bott class is given by an appropriate collection of explicitly written local differential forms on appropriate intersections of the covering domains. One of the main results of the paper (Theorem 3.4 in Section 3) provides a generalization of the residue of the Bott class. The residue was introduced in [\textit{J. L. Heitsch}, Mich. Math. J. 27, 181--194 (1980; Zbl 0443.57020)]. Ghys, Gómez-Mont and Saludes studied dynamics of transversely holomorphic foliations on closed manifolds in [\textit{É. Ghys, X. Gómez-Mont} and \textit{J. Saludes}, Enseign. Math. 38, 287--319 (2001; Zbl 1013.37043)]. They have shown that the foliated manifold admits a decomposition into three parts (analogous to Fatou-Julia decomposition in complex dynamics): \(J\) (Julia set), \(F_0\) (wandering Fatou component), \(F_L\) (the set where the foliation is transversely Lie); the foliation restricted to \(F_0\cup F_L\) is transversely Hermitian. The paper under review relates their results with the Bott class. It shows (Corollary 5.4) that the Bott class is determined by the germ of the foliation at \(F_0\cup J\). In particular, if \(F_0\cup J\) is empty, then the Bott class is zero. This is done by using the generalization of the residue. This extends a previous result by G. Duminy on the Godbillon-Vey class (from an unpublished preprint). Afterwards the author gives some applications to the Futaki invariant of a compact complex manifold \(M\). This invariant is a group homomorphism \(\Aut(M)\to\mathbb C\slash\mathbb Z\): its value on a given biholomorphism \(\sigma\) is expressed via the Bott class of some associated foliation. The latter is a foliation by real curves that is the suspension of \(\sigma\) over the unit translation \(\mathbb R\to\mathbb R\), \(x\mapsto x+1\). In Section 7 the author studies some examples of codimension 1 or 2 foliations with calculation of their Bott classes. Finally he studies complex structures on products of odd-dimensional spheres. These complex structures were introduced in [\textit{J. J. Loeb} and \textit{M. Nicolau}, Math. Ann. 306, No.~4, 781--817 (1996; Zbl 0860.32001)]. Each of them is induced by a certain holomorphic vector field with isolated singularity. The author proves triviality of the Futaki invariant in the case, when the corresponding vector field is linear ``diagonal''.