Energy of generalized distributions

Abstract

We consider the energy of smooth generalized distributions and also of singular foliations on compact Riemannian manifolds for which the set of their singularities consists of a finite number of isolated points and of pairwise disjoint closed submanifolds. We derive a lower bound for the energy of all $q$-dimensional almost regular distributions, for each $q< \dim M,$ and find several examples of foliations which minimize the energy functional over certain sets of smooth generalized distributions.