Foliations and webs inducing Galois coverings

Abstract

We introduce the notion of Galois holomorphic foliation on the complex projective space as that of foliations whose Gauss map is a Galois covering when restricted to an appropriate Zariski open subset. First, we establish general criteria assuring that a rational map between projective manifolds of the same dimension defines a Galois covering. Then, these criteria are used to give a geometric characterization of Galois foliations in terms of their inflection divisor and their singularities. We also characterize Galois foliations on $\mathbb P^2$ admitting continuous symmetries, obtaining a complete classification of Galois homogeneous foliations.