Stiffness in four-dimensional stable planes (Q1377196)

Stiffness of an incidence geometry is the property that automorphisms with rather small fixed configurations are forced to be the identity. For a 4-dimensional compact projective plane \({\mathcal P}\), the stiffness theorem of \textit{H. Salzmann} [Math. Z. 117, 112-124 (1970; Zbl 0205.50104)] says that an automorphism fixing a non-degenerate quadrangle has order at most two, and this is best possible. The automorphisms of open subplanes of \({\mathcal P}\) need not extend to \({\mathcal P}\), but if they do, then the invariance of the complement imposes extra stiffness. The paper under review captures this type of stiffness property even for general 4-dimensional stable planes and arbitrary automorphisms. Let \(\Sigma\) be a connected (Lie) group of automorphisms fixing a line \(L\). Then the action of \(\Sigma\) on \(L\) extends to the Freudenthal compactification \(F\) of \(L\) in a trivial way, i.e., all end points are fixed. The key observation is that the Freudenthal compactification of \(L\) may be obtained from the geometry by taking the line pencil \({\mathcal E}_p\) of a point \(p\notin L\) and shrinking each connected component of the set of parallels of \(L\) passing through \(p\) to a point. This shows that \(\Sigma_p\) fixes each of these components, and then the fixed point theorem of Cartwright and Littlewood [\textit{M. Brown}, Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 65, 372 (1977; Zbl 0369.57001)] yields a fixed parallel in each component. The final result says that, in the presence of noncompact lines, the nondegenerate quadrangle in Salzmann's theorem may be replaced by a judiciously chosen degenerate quadrangle (a triangle plus a further point on one of its sides). This improves and generalizes results of the reviewer that were based on the Cartwright-Littlewood theorem alone [Geom. Dedicata 5, 239-294 (1976; Zbl 0344.50003)]. The author uses this stiffness result in a series of forthcoming papers to classify 4-dimensional stable planes with an automorphism group of dimension at least 9.