Smooth Hughes planes are classical (Q1305336)

A smooth projective plane is a projective plane such that the point set and the line set are smooth manifolds and such that the geometric operations of joining and intersecting are smooth. In the paper under review the author continues his investigation of smooth projective planes. He deals with smooth Hughes planes and shows that every smooth Hughes planes is isomorphic as a smooth plane to one of the Moufang planes over the complex numbers \textbf{C}, the quaternions \textbf{H} or the Cayley numbers \textbf{O}. Since a 4-dimensional Hughes plane is isomorphic to the Desarguesian complex projective plane, only the 8- and 16-dimensional cases need to be examined. In both cases there is a one-parameter family of mutually non-isomorphic Hughes planes; a unified treatment of these planes can be found in the recent book by \textit{H. Salzmann} et al. [Compact projective planes. With an introduction to octonion geometry. De Gruyter Expositions in Mathematics 21, Berlin (1996; Zbl 0851.51003)]. Each point \(p\) of a smooth projective plane gives rise to an affine translation plane by taking the tangent space at \(p\) and the tangent spread induced by the lines through \(p\). The author shows that affine tangent translation planes at inner points of a smooth Hughes plane \({\mathcal P}\) are isomorphic to the classical affine planes over \textbf{H} or \textbf{O} and that the closed Desarguesian Baer subplane \({\mathcal D}\) of \({\mathcal P}\) is a smooth subplane of \({\mathcal P}\). Using various subgroups of the collineation group of the subplane \({\mathcal D}\) and the induced groups on a tangent translation plane, it is then shown that these groups act like in the classical case and thus that \({\mathcal P}\) is isomorphic to a Moufang plane over \textbf{H} or \textbf{O}. As a second result the author obtains a characterisation of the classical 8-dimensional projective plane over the quaternions among smooth planes in terms of the dimension of the automorphism group. He shows that an 8-dimensional smooth projective plane whose automorphism group has dimension at least 17 must be isomorphic to the classical plane over \textbf{H}. For topological compact 8-dimensional projective planes the corresponding lower bound is 19. To obtain his result, the author uses the classification of 8-dimensional projective planes whose automorphism groups have dimension at least 17. These or their duals are either translation planes or Hughes planes. For smooth planes the last case yields only the classical quaternion plane by the first result of the paper. Furthermore, by a result of \textit{J. Otte} [Geom. Dedicata 58, 203-212 (1995; Zbl 0838.51008)], each smooth projective translation plane is isomorphic to one of the classical projective planes over an alternative field.