Singular Levi-flats and holomorphic foliations on projective spaces

Abstract

We study codimension-one holomorphic foliations admitting invariant singular real-analytic Levi-flat varieties. Our main problem is to determine when the local meromorphic first integrals furnished by the Levi-flat geometry can be continued coherently and globalized. We introduce a pencil-singularity condition and a projective compatibility condition for local meromorphic parameters. In the projective plane these yield a characterization of foliations admitting a primitive rational first integral, while in higher-dimensional projective space they give a rational integrability criterion under a generic local-product hypothesis along the dicritical locus. We also obtain semi-global and Stein versions of these results. In a different direction, we study foliations admitting infinitely many invariant Levi-flat varieties and prove a Darboux-type alternative: either the foliation admits a rational first integral, or infinitely many Levi-flats contain a common invariant algebraic curve whose virtual holonomy is abelian. Under additional assumptions on the singularities, this leads to the existence of a closed rational, and in the absence of saddle-nodes a closed logarithmic, defining \(1\)-form.