Hurder, Steven Foliation dynamics and leaf invariants. (English) Zbl 0604.57021 Comment. Math. Helv. 60, 319-335 (1985). The author studies the relationship of leaf invariants of a foliation with the growth type of leaves. Leaf invariants are the characteristic classes of the normal bundles of the foliation restricted to a leaf, where the bundle is considered as a flat bundle. The main result in this direction is Theorem 3. Let L be a leaf of a \(C^ 2\)-foliation \({\mathcal F}\). If there is a leaf invariant \(y\in H^ m(L)\) with \(m>1\) and \(y\neq 0\), then the linear holonomy group of L is not amenable. The non-amenability of the linear holonomy group of L is related to the growth types of leaves of the foliation via Theorem 1. If the linear holonomy group of L is not amenable, then there is a leaf L’ in the closure of L such that for any Riemannian metric on the foliated manifold L’ has exponential growth. Reviewer: E.Vogt Cited in 1 Document MSC: 57R30 Foliations in differential topology; geometric theory 37A99 Ergodic theory 58H05 Pseudogroups and differentiable groupoids 43A07 Means on groups, semigroups, etc.; amenable groups Keywords:leaf invariants of a foliation; growth type of leaves; characteristic classes; linear holonomy group; amenable; exponential growth PDFBibTeX XMLCite \textit{S. Hurder}, Comment. Math. Helv. 60, 319--335 (1985; Zbl 0604.57021) Full Text: DOI EuDML