Classical subspaces of symplectic Grassmannians (Q2471463)

The author considers the rank 2 incidence geometry \(C_{n,k}({\mathbb F})\), \(1\leq k\leq n\), of symplectic \(k\)-Grassmannians with points the totally isotropic \(k\)-dimensional subspaces of a symplectic \(2n\)-dimensional vector space over a field \({\mathbb F}\) and lines of the form \(T(D,C)=\{U: C<U<D\}\) for pairs of subspaces \(C< D< C^\perp\) of dimension \(k-1\) and \(k+1\), respectively. He asks whether each (geometric) subspace \(S\) of \(C_{n,k}({\mathbb F})\) which is isomorphic to some geometry \({\mathcal G}_{m,j}({\mathbb F})\) (the analogously defined rank 2 incidence geometry of \(j\)-Grassmannians in an \(m\)-dimensional vector space where \(2\leq j\leq m-2\)) is parabolic, that is, its stablizer in the automorphism group \(\Gamma\) of \(C_{n,k}({\mathbb F})\), which is isomorphic to \(\text{ PSp}_{2n}({\mathbb F})\), is a parabolic subgroup of \(\Gamma\). It is shown that the answer is affirmative except when \(\text{ char }~{\mathbb F}=2\), \((m,j)=(4,2)\) and \(S\) is a subspace of \(T(U^\perp, U)\) for some totally isotropic \((k-1)\)-dimensional subspace \(U\) such that \(U\) has codimension 6 in the subspace spanned by all the elements of \(S\). The proof is by induction on \(N=n+k+m-\min\{j,m-j\}\) using well-known properties of (symplectic) Grassmannians and their maximal singular subspaces and of polar spaces. The start of the induction is covered in the cases \((m,j)=(4,2)\), which also leads to the exceptional situation, and \(\min\{j,m-j\}=2\).