Gauge-reversing maps on cones, and Hilbert and Thompson isometries (Q1676766)

In this paper, the author studies the maps between cones that preserve or reverse the gauge, or are isometries of one of the two metrics. In the introduction the author presents his main results: He shows that a cone admits a gauge-reversing map if and only if it is a symmetric cone (Theorem 1.1). Then the author uses this to prove that if there is a gauge-reversing bijection between two finite-dimensional cones, then the cones are linearly isomorphic (Corollary 1.2). He also uses this to prove that every isometry of a Hilbert geometry is a projectivity unless the Hilbert geometry is the projective space of a non-Lorentzian symmetric cone, in which case the projectivity group is of index two in the isometry group (Theorem 1.3 and Corollary 1.4). The author determines the isometry group of the Thompson geometry on a cone (Theorem 1.5) too. In Section 2 the author recalls some background material. In Section 3 the author proves that the existence of a gauge-reversing map on a cone implies that the cone is homogeneous. In Section 4 the author recalls the definition of the horofunction boundary and describes known results about it in the case of the Hilbert geometry in Section 5. Using these results, the author finishes the proof of Theorem 1.1 and of Corollary 1.2 in Section 6. In Section 7, he studies the isometries of the Hilbert geometry and proved Theorem 1.3 and Corollary 1.4. Sections 8 is devoted to the study of the horofunction boundaries of product spaces. In Section 9, the author determines the horofunction boundary of the Thompson geometry and its set of Busemann points. Then he calculates the detour metric on the boundary. These results are then used in Section 10 to prove Theorem 1.5.