Stable planes from Lie groups with planar partitions (Q1591225)

The paper under review is based on the second chapter of the author's dissertation [Partitions of Lie groups and point-regular stable geometries. Thesis, TU Darmstadt (1999; Zbl 0927.51024)]. Here the author studies Lie groups \(G\) that admit planar partitions \({\mathcal P}\) into closed subgroups of dimension half the dimension of \(G\). In this case \(G\) gives rise to a translation structure \((G,{\mathcal G})\) with point set \(G\) and line set \({\mathcal G}\) whose elements are the cosets of the subgroups in \({\mathcal P}\). The author then asks under which conditions \((G,{\mathcal G})\) becomes a stable plane, that is, when can \({\mathcal G}\) be equipped with a locally compact topology such that the geometric operations of joining two distinct points by a line and intersecting lines in a point become continuous and such that the domain of the intersection map is open in \({\mathcal G}\times{\mathcal G}\). The corresponding partition is then called stable. Since line pencils in a stable plane are compact, the partition \({\mathcal P}\) itself must be compact in the space of all closed subgroups of \(G\). The author shows that this condition on a planar partition suffices to obtain a stable plane thus confirming a conjecture by \textit{M. Stroppel} [J. Geom. 59, 173-181 (1997; Zbl 0884.51002)]. In fact, the author characterises the stable planes among the homogeneous planes as those that admit a point \(p\) such that the line pencil through \(p\) is a regular and compact subset of the line set. The author further derives an infinitesimal criterion for stability of a translation structure \((G,{\mathcal G})\) by investigating its tangent structure at a point (infinitesimal model). He shows that a planar partition \({\mathcal P}\) of \(G\) is stable if and only if the planar partition \(L{\mathcal P}=\{LP \mid P\in{\mathcal P}\}\) of the Lie algebra \(LG\) of \(G\) into Lie subalgebras \(LP\) is a spread of \(LG\) which is compact in the Grassmann topology so that \((LG,LG+L{\mathcal P})\) is a topological translation plane.