Jets of foliations and $b^k$-algebroids

Abstract

In this article, we introduce and study singular foliations of $b^k$-type. These singular foliations formalize the properties of vector fields that are tangent to order $k$ along a submanifold $W \subset M$. Our first result is a classification of these foliations, relating them to geometric structures defined in a formal neighborhood of the submanifold, such as jets of distributions that are involutive up to order $k-1$. When $W$ is a hypersurface, singular foliations of $b^k$-type are Lie algebroids. In this particular case, they are generalizations of the $b^k$-tangent bundles introduced by Scott. Indeed, they are always locally isomorphic to $b^k$-tangent bundles, but globally such an isomorphism is obstructed by a holonomy invariant. Our second main result is a Riemann-Hilbert-style classification of singular foliations of $b^k$-type in terms of holonomy representations. In this paper, we study singular foliations of $b^k$-type from several different perspectives. In particular: (1) We study the problem of extending a $k$-th-order foliation to a $(k+1)$-th order foliation and prove that this is obstructed by a characteristic class. (2) When $W$ is a hypersurface, we give a detailed study of algebroid differential forms and extend Scott's calculation of the cohomology. (3) We study algebroid symplectic forms in terms of the geometric structures induced on $W$. In particular, we find that there is a close relationship between the above obstruction class for extensions and the symplectic variation of the symplectic foliation induced on $W$.