On epimorphisms of spherical Moufang buildings. (Q1929202)

The article characterizes the epimorphisms of irreducible spherical Moufang buildings of rank \(\geq 2\). If the Moufang buildings are defined over a field (in a sense made more precise below) it is shown that epimorphisms correspond to valuations of the underlying field satisfying certain compatability conditions. The remarkable thing here is that the author uses \(\mathbb R\)-buildings to answer a question on spherical buildings where usually techniques work in the other direction. He shows that the indecomposable epimorphisms arise in a geometric way from \(\mathbb R\)-buildings. To make precise what the author means by saying the Moufang buildings under consideration need to be ``defined over a field'' we would like to mention that the only spherical Moufang buildings of rank \(\geq 2\) not covered by the results in this paper are projective spaces defined over non-Abelian skew-fields or octonian division algebras and those polar spaces defined over non-Abelian skew-fields which are not of quadratic type. The latter are covered in a follow up paper by \textit{P. Schwer} and \textit{K. Struyve} [Epimorphisms of pseudo-quadratic polar spaces, to appear in J. Algebra, \url{arXiv:1210.8356}].