Foliated Milnor conjecture

Abstract

We prove that a fundamental group of codimension one nonnegative Ricci curvature C2-foliation of a closed Riemannian manifold is finitely generated and almost abelian, i.e. it contains abelian subgroup of finite index. In particular, we confirm the Milnor conjecture for manifolds which are leaves of codimension one nonnegative Ricci curvature foliation of closed manifold.