Sasakian structures. A foliated approach

Abstract

Recent renewed interest in Sasakian manifolds is due mainly to the fact that they can provide examples of generalized Einstein manifolds, manifolds which are of great interest in mathematical models of various aspects of physical phenomena. Sasakian manifolds are odd dimensional counterparts of Kählerian manifolds to which they are closely related. The book of Ch. Boyer and K. Galicki, Sasakian Geometry is both the best introduction to the subject and at the same time it gathers state of the art information and results on these manifolds. However, although the authors are well aware that a Sasakian structure is a very special one-dimensional Riemannian foliation with Kählerian transverse structure, they use this fact only in a few very special cases. The paper presents an approach to Sasakian manifolds on which the author gave several lectures, most recently at the Workshop on almost hermitian and contact geometry at the Banach Center in Bȩdlewo in October 2015 and at University of the Basque Country in February 2016. The first lectures on the topic the author gave at Universidad de Sevilla in October 1988 and then presented the consequence for the geometry of Sasakian manifolds, in particular the relationns between various curvatures and those of the transverse Kähler manifold. The results were published in several sections of \cite{WO_S} as well as in \cite{Wo_deb}. The most general theory of geometrical structures "adapted" to a foliation was presented in \cite{WO_T}, see also \cite{WO_S}. The paper concentrates on cohomological properties of Sasakian manifolds and of transversely holomorphic and Kählerian foliations. These properties permit to formulate obstructions to the existence of Sasakian structures on compact manifolds. The presented results are due to the author as well as his former and present Ph.D. students.