Rigidity of Lie foliations with locally symmetric leaves

Abstract

We prove that if the leaves of a minimal Lie foliation are locally isometric to a symmetric space of non-compact type without a Poincare disk factor, then the foliation is smoothly conjugate to a homogeneous Lie foliation up to finite covering. This result generalizes and strengthens Zimmer's theorem, which characterizes minimal Lie foliations with leaves isometric to a symmetric space of non-compact type without real rank one factors as pullbacks of homogeneous foliations. As applications, we extend Zimmer's arithmeticity theorem for holonomy groups and establish a rigidity theorem for Riemannian foliations with locally symmetric leaves.