Sisterhoods of flat Laguerre planes (Q1904113)

It is well known that there is a close connection between Laguerre planes and anti-regular (generalized) quadrangles: from every Laguerre plane one obtains in a rather natural way an anti-regular quadrangle (called the `mother' of the Laguerre plane in the paper under review), and derivation of an anti-regular quadrangle at any point yields a Laguerre plane. Two Laguerre planes are called `sisters' if they have the same mother. In a topological setting, one requires topologies on the spaces of points and circles or lines, respectively, such that the relevant geometric operations are continuous. For flat Laguerre planes, one assumes in addition that each circle and each class of parallel points is a one-dimensional manifold (then the point space is a two-dimensional manifold). According to results of Forst, the mother of any flat Laguerre plane is a topological generalized quadrangle whose lines and line pencils are one-dimensional manifolds (then both the point space and the line space are three-dimensional), and conversely. In the paper under review, two interesting classes of flat Laguerre planes are considered: Laguerre planes of translation type over skew parabolae, and Laguerre planes of shear type over skew parabolae. Here a skew parabolae is a function \(f_{\alpha \beta} : \mathbb{R} \to \mathbb{R}\) defined by \(f_{\alpha \beta} (x) = \begin{cases} x^\alpha \quad & \text{for } x \geq 0 \\ \beta |x |^\alpha \quad & \text{for } x \leq 0 \end{cases}\), where \(\alpha, \beta > 0\). The Laguerre planes are now obtained by shifting the closures of graphs of scalar multiples of skew parabolae in \((\mathbb{R} \cup \{\infty\}) \times \mathbb{R}\) by translations or suitable translations and shears, respectively. These Laguerre planes were introduced by Löwen and Pfüller. In general, there are no isomorphisms between Laguerre planes of translation or shear type over skew parabolae for different parameters. In the paper under review, it is shown, however, that certain pairs of Laguerre planes of translation or shear type over skew parabolae are sisters.