Simple compactifications and polar decomposition of homogeneous real spherical spaces (Q2355003)

A real spherical space is, by definition, the quotient space of a real reductive algebraic group by a closed algebraic subgroup, such that the action of any minimal parabolic subgroup defined over the real field admits an open orbit. The authors study the large scale geometry of a real spherical space by proving that such a space admits a polar decomposition. The main tool used to prove this result is called simple compactification, which means a compactification with a unique closed orbit. After recalling the basic geometry of real spherical spaces in Section 2, they construct in Section 3 an explicit representation space which gives rise to an embedding of a given real spherical space into a projective space. They show that the closure of the image is a simple compactification. Using this embedding (and with a simple reduction on the closed subgroup), they prove the main result in Section 4, providing a preliminary result on a polar decomposition of real spherical spaces. In Section 5, they refine this decomposition result using the idea of `compression cone'. In the last section, they use the main result to prove a fact about a special kind of real spherical spaces called `wavefront', and suggest that this kind of spaces is related to the lattice counting problem.