Commuting tuples in reductive groups and their maximal compact subgroups. (Q371277)

Let \(G\) be a reductive algebraic group and \(K \subset G\) a maximal compact subgroup. The authors consider the representation spaces \(\Hom({\mathbf Z}^k,K)\) and \(\Hom{(\mathbf Z}^k,G)\) with the topology induced from an embedding into \(K^k\) and \(G^k\), respectively. The goal of this paper is to prove that \(\Hom({\mathbf Z}^k,K)\) is a strong deformation retract of \(\Hom({\mathbf Z}^k,G)\).