Long time behavior of leafwise heat flow for Riemannian foliations

Abstract

For any Riemannian foliation F on a closed manifold M with an arbitrary bundle-like metric, leafwise heat flow of differential forms is proved to preserve smoothness on M at infinite time. This result and its proof have consequences about the space of bundle-like metrics on M, about the dimension of the space of leafwise harmonic forms, and mainly about the second term of the differentiable spectral sequence of F.