The Einstein-Hilbert type action on foliated pseudo-Riemannian manifolds

Abstract

We develop variation formulas on almost-product (e.g. foliated) pseudo-Riemannian manifolds, and we consider variations of metric preserving orthogonality of the distributions. These formulae are applied to Einstein-Hilbert type actions: the total mixed scalar curvature and the total extrinsic scalar curvature of a distribution. The obtained Euler-Lagrange equations admit a number of solutions, e.g., twisted products, conformal submersions and isoparametric foliations. The paper generalizes recent results about the actions on codimension-one foliations for the case of arbitrary (co)dimension.