Foliations with vanishing Chern classes

Abstract

In this paper we aim at the description of foliations having tangent sheaf $T\mathcal F$ with $c_1(T\mathcal F)=c_2(T\mathcal F)=0$ on non-uniruled projective manifolds. We prove that the universal covering of the ambient manifold splits as a product, and that the Zariski closure of a general leaf of $\mathcal F$ is an Abelian variety. It turns out that the analytic type of the Zariski closures of leaves may vary from leaf to leaf. We discuss how this variation is related to arithmetic properties of the tangent sheaf of the foliation.