The skew-hyperbolic motion group of the quaternion plane (Q1358625)

The author considers locally compact stable planes, i.e. linear spaces (in the sense of incidence geometry) whose point spaces are locally compact and of finite topological dimension, and whose line spaces are also locally compact such that joining points and the intersecting lines are continuous mappings with open domains, and the question of how far the geometrical structure of a stable plane is determined when the action of a certain group of automorphisms is assumed. To begin with the author classifies the polarities of the quaternion plane \(\pi({\mathbf H})\) into three conjugacy classes. The underlying semi-bilinear forms are given by one of the three matrices having \((1,1,1)\), \((1,1,-1)\) or \((i,i,i)\) on their respective diagonals and zeros elsewhere. For the first (elliptic) and second (hyperbolic) case \textit{R. Löwen} [Result. Math. 9, 119-130 (1986; Zbl 0588.51018)] has shown that any 8-dimensional stable plane which admits an effective action of the centralizer of such a polarity must be isomorphic to \(\pi({\mathbf H})\). The author treats the third case of so-called skew-hyperbolic polarities. The centralizer \(\Gamma\) of such a polarity is called the skew-hyperbolic motion group of \(\pi\). \(\Gamma\) is the quotient modulo its center of the unitary group on \({\mathbf H}^3\) with respect to the skew Hermitian form \(\sum^3_{\alpha= 1}x_\alpha i\overline{y_\alpha}\). As a main result, the author generalizes Löwens result to the skew-hyperbolic case (Theorem 3.6): Every non-trivial action of \(\Gamma\) on an 8-dimensional stable plane \({\mathbf M}\) is embeddable into the usual action of \(\Gamma\) on \(\pi({\mathbf H})\). \(M\) is either isomorphic to \(\pi({\mathbf H})\) or to the subplane induced on some \(\Gamma\)-orbits. The proof relies on a thorough study of the involutions in \(\Gamma\). All these investigations embed into the author's program of classifying the actions on stable planes of groups containing no proper nontrivial connected normal subgroups. In the scope of this program, the author proves (Proposition 4.5) that the projective symplectic group \(\text{PSp}_6({\mathbf R})\) never acts non-trivially on an 8-dimensional stable plane [cf. also the author, Math. Z. 226, 1-9 (1997)].