Fixed points for automorphisms in Cartan domains of type IV (Q1177662)

Suppose \({\mathcal D}\) is a Cartan domain of type four. It is well known that such domains are bounded symmetric domains. The purpose of the present paper is to study the structure of the set of fixed points of holomorphic automorphisms of such a Cartan domain \({\mathcal D}\). There is a direct proof of the fact that each holomorphic automorphism \(f\) extends to a holomorphic, and thus continuous, function on the closure \(\overline{\mathcal D}\). If \(f\in\hbox{Aut}{\mathcal D}\) has a fixed point, then it is shown that the fixed point set is not only connected, since it is convex, but also is arcwise holomorphically connected, i.e. for any two points in the fixed point set there is a complex geodesic for the Kobayashi metric on \({\mathcal D}\) which lies in \({\mathcal D}\) and contains the two points. The last part of the paper investigates the fixed point sets of the continuous extension to the boundary in the case where the automorphism itself has no fixed point in \({\mathcal D}\). It is proved that, in almost all cases, the fixed point set consists of \(p\) points and the intersections of \(r\) affine complex lines with \(\overline{\mathcal D}\), with the bound \(p+2r\leq 4\) which comes from a determination of the number of linearly independent eigenvectors that can be associated to eigenvalues different from 1 or -1.