Dirac operators on foliations: the Lichnerowicz inequality

We construct Dirac operators on foliations by applying the Bismut-Lebeau analytic localization technique to the Connes fibration over a foliation. The Laplacian of the resulting Dirac operators has better lower bound than that obtained by using the usual adiabatic limit arguments on the original foliation. As a consequence, we prove an extension of the Lichnerowicz-Hitchin vanishing theorem to the case of foliations.