(Twin) Buildings and groups

Abstract: Buildings have been introduced by Tits in order to study semi-simple algebraic groups from a geometrical point of view. One of the most important results in the theory of buildings is the classification of thick irreducible spherical buildings of rank at least 3. In particular, any such building comes from an RGD-system. The decisive tool in this classification is the Extension theorem for spherical buildings, i.e. a local isometry extends to the whole building. Twin buildings were introduced by Ronan and Tits in the late 1980s. Their definition was motivated by the theory of Kac-Moody groups over fields. Each such group acts naturally on a pair of buildings and the action preserves an opposition relation between the chambers of the two buildings. This opposition relation shares many important properties with the opposition relation on the chambers of a spherical building. Thus, twin buildings appear to be natural generalizations of spherical buildings with infinite Weyl group. Since the notion of RGD-systems exists not only in the spherical case, one can ask whether any twin building (satisfying some further conditions) comes from an RGD-system. In 1992 Tits proves several results that are inspired by his strategy in the spherical case and he discusses several obstacles for obtaining a similar Extension theorem for twin buildings. In this talk I will speak about the history and developments of the Extension theorem for twin buildings.

group theory

Audience: researchers in the discipline

Symmetry in Newcastle