Uniruled varieties with split tangent bundle

Abstract

Beauville asked if a compact Kähler manifold with split tangent bundle has a universal covering that is a product of manifolds. We use Mori theory and elementary results about holomorphic foliations to study this problem for projective uniruled varieties. In particular we obtain an affirmative answer for rationally connected varieties in any dimension and uniruled varieties in dimension 4.