Godbillon-Vey classes of regular Jacobi manifolds

Abstract

The notion of a Jacobi manifold is a natural generalization of that of a Poisson manifold. A Jacobi manifold has a natural foliation in which each leaf has either a contact structure or a locally conformal symplectic structure. In this paper, we study a characteristic class called the Godbillon-Vey class for Jacobi manifolds with regular foliation and express it explicitly in terms of Jacobi structures.