Lagrangian Grassmannians and spinor varieties in characteristic two (Q2330839)

Given a \(2n\)-dimensional vector space \(V\) endowed with an alternating bilinear form, the \textit{Lagrangian Grassmanian} \(\mathrm{LG}(n,2n)\) parametrizes the Langrangian (i.e., maximal isotropic) subspaces inside the Grassmanian variety of all \(n\)-dimensional subspaces. There is a natural way to realise the space of \(n\times n\) symmetric matrices as a subset of this Lagrangian Grassmanian. Further, the map from symmetric spaces to projective space of dimension \(2^n-1\) given by taking principal minors extends to to whole of \(\mathrm{LG}(n,2n)\). All this is well-studied and understood over the complex numbers, for example. The purpose of the paper under review is to study this set-up (and related ones) in characteristic \(2\). In particular, it is shown that the image of the map above is defined by quadrics for all \(n\), which extends a previous result for \(n=3,4\) [\textit{F. Holweck} et al., SIGMA, Symmetry Integrability Geom. Methods Appl. 10, Paper 041, 16 p. (2014; Zbl 1286.05020)]. The authors also show that the image is none other than the spinor variety associated to \(\mathrm{Spin}(2n+1)\). There are many other related results in the paper, together with examples which apparently have applications in physics.