Numerically flat foliations and holomorphic Poisson geometry

Abstract

We investigate the structure of smooth holomorphic foliations with numerically flat tangent bundles on compact K\"ahler manifolds. Extending earlier results on non-uniruled projective manifolds by the second and fourth authors, we show that such foliations induce a decomposition of the tangent bundle of the ambient manifold, have leaves uniformized by Euclidean spaces, and have torsion canonical bundle. Additionally, we prove that smooth two-dimensional foliations with numerically trivial canonical bundle on projective manifolds are either isotrivial fibrations or have numerically flat tangent bundles. This in turn implies a global Weinstein splitting theorem for rank-two Poisson structures on projective manifolds. We also derive new Hodge-theoretic conditions for the existence of zeros of Poisson structures on compact K\"ahler manifolds.