CMC foliations of closed manifolds

William H. Meeks III, Joaquin Perez

Published 2014-04-07, updated 2014-08-27Version 3

We prove that every closed, smooth $n$-manifold $X$ admits a Riemannian metric together with a smooth, transversely oriented CMC foliation if and only if its Euler characteristic is zero, where by CMC foliation we mean a codimension-one, transversely oriented foliation with leaves of constant mean curvature and where the value of the constant mean curvature can vary from leaf to leaf. Furthermore, we prove that this CMC foliation of $X$ can be chosen so that the constant values of the mean curvatures of its leaves change sign. We also prove a general structure theorem for any such non-minimal CMC foliation of $X$ that describes relationships between the geometry and topology of the leaves, including the property that there exist compact leaves for every attained value of the mean curvature.