Characterizations by automorphism groups of some rank 3 buildings. I: Some properties of half strongly-transitive triangle buildings (Q1275279)

In this series of four papers, the authors classify certain affine hyperbolic buildings of rank three in terms of their automorphism groups. In Part I and II, they introduce the notion of a half strongly-transitive automorphism group: such a group acts transitively on all pairs of chambers \(C,D\) with distance \(\delta(C,D)=w\), for all \(w\in W\). For spherical buildings, this is equivalent with the notion of a strongly transitive group, since opposite chambers determine a unique apartment. Constructions of \textit{J. Tits} [Invent. Math. 43, 283-295 (1977; Zbl 0399.20037)] and \textit{K. Tent} [to appear in J. London Math. Soc.] show that it is impossible to classify buildings with strongly transitive automorphism groups. In Part I \& II, the authors prove the following remarkable result: A locally finite triangle building with a half strongly-transitive automorphism group is Moufang and arises from a locally finite skew field with a discrete valuation. The idea of the proof is to construct a sequence of Hjelmslev planes and to prove that these planes are Moufang. A Corollary of this result (which is not mentioned in the paper) is that an infinite totally disconnected compact projective plane which admits a 4-gon transitive automorphism group is Moufang, provided that it admits a projective valuation (private communication by the second author). In Part III, Van Steen discusses various Moufang-like conditions for affine buildings. The definition of an affine Moufang building given in \textit{M. Ronan}'s book [`Lectures on buildings', Academic Press (1989; Zbl 0694.51001)] has the disadvantage thas it is not satisfied by affine buildings over the \(p\)-adics. The author proposes a `\(p\)-adic Moufang condition' and a `root-Moufang condition'. She shows that a triangle building is a Bruhat-Tits building if and only if it satisfies the root-Moufang condition (the Bruhat-Tits buildings are the affine buildings associated to discrete valuations). If an affine building of rank three satisfies the \(p\)-adic Moufang condition, then it is a Bruhat-Tits building, and the Bruhat-Tits triangle buildings over the \(p\)-adics satisfy the \(p\)-adic Moufang condition. In Part IV the authors consider the \(p\)-adic Moufang condition for hyperbolic buildings. The main result is that such a building is of type \(\Delta_{3-4-6}\) (i.e. its residues are triangles, quadrangles and hexagons), provided that the characteristic is different from 2 and 3. This result confirms the (open) conjecture that no \(p\)-adic hyperbolic Moufang buildings exist.