On the Dirac spectrum of Riemannian foliations admitting a basic parallel 1-form

In this paper, in the special setting of a Riemannian foliation with basic, non-necessarily harmonic mean curvature we introduce a Weitzenbock-Lichnerowicz type formula which allows us to apply the classical Bochner-Lichnerowicz technique. We show that the lower bound for the eigenvalues of the basic Dirac operator can be calculated using only classical techniques. As another application, for general Riemannian foliations we calculate the above eigenvalue bound in the presence of a basic parallel 1-form, as an extension of a known result on a closed Riemannian manifold. Some results concerning the limiting case are obtained in the final part of the paper. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.