A h-principle for symplectic foliations

Abstract

We show that a classical result of Gromov in symplectic geometry extends to the context of symplectic foliations, which we regard as a $h$-principle for (regular) Poisson geometry. Namely, we formulate a sufficient cohomological criterion for a regular bivector to be homotopic to a regular Poisson structure, in the spirit of Haefliger's criterion for homotoping a distribution to a foliation. We give an example to show that this criterion is not too unsharp.