Submanifolds with ample normal bundle

Abstract

We construct germs of complex manifolds of dimension $m$ along projective submanifolds of dimension $n$ with ample normal bundle and without non-constant meromorphic functions whenever $m\ge 2n$. We also show that our methods do not allow the construction of similar examples when $m<2n$ by establishing an algebraicity criterion for foliations on projective spaces which generalizes a classical result by Van den Ven characterizing linear subspaces of projective spaces as the only submanifolds with split tangent sequence.