Geometry of foliations and flows I: Almost transverse pseudo-Anosov flows and asymptotic behavior of foliations

Abstract

Let F be a foliation in a closed 3-manifold with negatively curved fundamental group and suppose that F is almost transverse to a quasigeodesic pseudo-Anosov flow. We show that the leaves of the foliation in the universal cover extend continuously to the sphere at infinity, hence the limit sets are continuous images of the circle. One important corollary is that if F is a Reebless finite depth foliation in a hyperbolic manifold, then it has the continuous extension property. Such finite depth foliations exist whenever the second Betti number is non zero. The result also applies to other classes of foliations, including a large class of foliations where all leaves are dense and infinitely many examples with one sided branching. One key tool is a detailed understanding of asymptotic properties of almost pseudo-Anosov singular 1-dimensional foliations in the leaves of F lifted to the universal cover.