Positively curved Killing foliations via deformations

Abstract: We show that a compact manifold admitting a Killing foliation with positive transverse curvature fibers over finite quotients of spheres or weighted complex projective spaces, provided that the singular foliation defined by the closures of the leaves has maximal dimension. This result is obtained by deforming the foliation into a closed one while maintaining transverse geometric properties, which allows us to apply results from the Riemannian geometry of orbifolds to the space of leaves. We also show that the basic Euler characteristic is preserved by such deformations. Using this fact we prove that a Riemannian foliation of a compact manifold with finite fundamental group and nonvanishing Euler characteristic is closed. As another application we obtain that, for a positively curved Killing foliation of a compact manifold, if the structural algebra has sufficiently large dimension then the basic Euler characteristic is positive.