TRANSVERSE HARMONIC FIELDS ON RIEMANNIAN MANIFOLDS

We discuss transverse harmonic fields on compact foliated Riemannian manifolds, and give a necessary and sufficient condition for a transverse field to be a transverse harmonic one and the non-existence of transverse harmonic fields. 1. On a foliated Riemannian manifold, geometric transverse fields, that is, transverse Killing, affine, projective, conformal fields were discussed by Kamber and Tondeur([3]), Molino ([5], [6]), Pak and Yorozu ([7]) and others. If the foliation is one by points, then transverse fields are usual fields on Riemannian manifolds. Thus it is natural to extend well known results concerning those fields on Riemannian manifolds to foliated cases. On the other hand, the following theorem is well known ([1], [10]): If the Ricci operator in a compact Riemannian manifold M is non-negative everywhere, then a harmonic vector field in M has a vanishing covariant derivative. If the Ricci operator in M is positive-definite, then a harmonic vector field other than zero does not exist in M.